en last I wrote
have silently stolen away, like Longfellow's Arabs; and I am now
engaged to be married to the woman whom I have loved for three years
and a half. I will boast myself so far as to say that I do not think
many wives are better loved than mine will be."

[Footnote 17: Previously published in _Scribner's
Magazine_, October, 1916.]

When the rain-clouds at last rolled away, and the snow had melted from
the mountain-tops in the Coast Range, Fanny Osbourne and Robert Louis
Stevenson went quietly across the bay and were married, on May 19,
1880, by the Reverend Mr. Scott, with only Mrs. Scott and Mrs. Virgil
Williams as witnesses. It was a serious, rather than a joyous
occasion, for both realized that a future overcast with doubt lay
before them. In 1881 Stevenson wrote from Pitlochry in Scotland to Mr.
P. G. Hamerton:

"It was not my bliss that I was interested in when I was married; it
was a sort of marriage _in extremis_; and if I am where I am, it is
thanks to the care of that lady, who married me when I was a mere
complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of
mortality than a bridegroom."

As for her, she married him when his fortunes, both in health and
finances, were at their lowest ebb, and she took this step in the
almost certain conviction that in a few months at least she would be a
widow. The best that she hoped for was to make his last days as
comfortable and happy as possible, and that her self-sacrifice was to
receive the bountiful reward of fourteen rich years in his
companionship, during which time she was to see him win fame and
fortune by the exercise of his genius, was far from her dreams.

At the time of their marriage they took with them Mrs. Stevenson's
son, Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, her daughter having been married a short
time before to Joseph Strong, a well-known artist of the Pacific
Coast. Mr. Stevenson took this boy, then about twelve years of age, to
his heart as his own. In fact he always counted it as one of the
blessings that came through his wife that she brought to him, a
childless man, a son and daughter to be a comfort to him in all the
years of his life. In his talk at his last Thanksgiving dinner he
referred to this as one of his chief reasons for gratitude.

In the healing air of Mount Saint Helena the invalid grew better with
astonishing rapidity, and at the end of June he wrote to his mother:

"You must indeed pardon me.