Some hints of autumn are in the soft, warm airs that blow through the smoke and heat of London. The fashionable season is over, and the gay butterflies of fashion have begun to seek "fresh fields and pastures new." Lady Clive begins to think of flitting with the rest.

It has been settled that the Countess of Fairvale shall remain with the Clives for the autumn and winter months at least. She is in mourning for her father, and is quite settled in her mind at first that she will go home to her ancestral castle and spend the period of retirement in strict seclusion with a proper chaperon. But the Clives will not hear of it. Lady Clive is afraid that she will mope herself to death.

"Besides, I shall be so lonely," she declares. "Philip is going back soon to his own home, and we shall have no young people with us at all if Lady Vera leaves us, too. My dear, do say that you will stay. We are not going to be very gay this season. Sir Harry and I want to take the children down to our country home, where they may roll in the grass to their hearts' content. Let us invite two or three sweet young girls, and as many young men, to go down with us, and we can have such a charming time, with picnics and lawn tennis, and simple country pleasures. Then, after awhile, we will go to Switzerland and climb the Alps. What say you, my little countess?"

Lady Vera, so ardently pressed, yields a gentle assent, and the party of "sweet, young girls" and eligible young men is immediately organized, Captain Lockhart promising to go down with them and remain a week before he returns to America.

So in the late summer they go down to Sunny Bank, as the Clives call the large, rambling, ornate pile of white buildings that is the sweetest home in all Devonshire.

The children go mad with delight over the fragrant grass and the autumnal flowers. The young people begin to pair off in couples, and one day Vera goes for a walk with the American soldier.

She is looking her fairest and sweetest. A dress of soft, rich, lusterless black drapes her slender figure superbly, and the round, white column of her throat rises lily-like from the thin, soft ruche of black around it, her face appearing like some rare flower beneath the shade of her wide, black Gainsborough hat. No wonder that Captain Lockhart's dark blue eyes return again and again to that delicately lovely face.

They walk slowly down the green, country lane, bordered with oak and holly. The flowers are beginning to fade, and the air is sweet with their pungent fragrance. The sky is deeply blue, with little, white, silvery clouds sailing softly over it. The sun is shining sweet and warm as if it were May. Little birds are singing blithely for joy as if the spring-time had come again.

"Do you know that this is the first time I have walked by your side since that day last spring, when you were so cruel to me?" he asks, breaking a long interval of silence that has been perilously sweet.

"Cruel?" she says, lifting to his the half-shy gaze of the dark and dreamy eyes.

"Yes, cruel, for you forbade me even to look at you," he answers, smiling now over that past pain in the eager elation of the present. "Ah, Lady Vera, you did not know then, perhaps, what a cross you laid upon me—that I loved you even then so dearly——"

"Hush!" she cries, in such a startled voice that he pauses and looks around to see what has frightened her.

"What is it, Lady Vera? Has anything alarmed you?" he asks her, anxiously.

"Nothing, but that I am tired. I will sit down here on this mossy log, and rest a moment," she answers, sinking wearily down, a sudden paleness chasing the roses from her cheeks. Captain Lockhart throws himself down on the short, velvety, green turf at her feet. There ensues a short silence, broken only by the hum of the busy insects, the song of the birds, and the soft rustle of a passing wind in the leaves overhead.

There is some embarrassment in their silence. Her cry of alarm has been so sharp and sudden that he does not know how to return to the interrupted subject. And yet his heart is so full of it.

He looks into the lovely, spirited young face, and he cannot keep the words back any longer.

He turns to her suddenly, and tells her the story of his love in burning words, whose eloquent fire brooks no check nor remonstrance. His face glows under its soldierly brown, his blue eyes darken with feeling, his voice trembles with passion, but when he pauses, Lady Vera, who has heard him through with tightly clenched hands and a strangely blanched face, can only falter:

"You love me, Captain Lockhart? I thought—that we were only friends."

The frightened, wondering voice falls like ice upon his heart.

"Only friends," he echoes, "when I have loved you since the first hour I saw you. Oh, Lady Vera, do not grow so pale! Is it strange that I should love you? Others have been as wild and presumptuous as I have. Others have come down before the fire of those dark eyes, slain by their beauty. I know you have been cold, indifferent to all, even to me at first. But when you thawed to me at last, when you were kindly and friendly——"

"Yes, that was all," she interrupts him, in a kind of frantic haste. "I was kind and friendly, that was all. I meant no more, believe me."

The soldier's blue eyes look at her with a keen reproach before which her own glance wavers and falls.

"Lady Vera, you are no coquette," he exclaims, "and yet I could swear that you have given me encouragement to hope that you would love me. Do you remember the beautiful poems of love I have read to you, with my very heart on my lips? Do you remember the songs I have sung to you, and the dreamy twilights when we sat and talked together? Do you remember how you have worn the flowers I brought you? You have blushed and smiled for me as you did for no other, and you are no coquette. Oh, my darling, surely you will love me?"

As he talks to her, the color goes from white to red, and red to white in her beautiful face. Her lips quiver, the tears spring into her eyes.

"You are blaming me," she says, incoherently, "but you have no right. I know nothing of love. I thought we were only friends. I am so sorry."

"Do you mean to say you do not love me, that you did not know I loved you, and was seeking you for my wife, Lady Vera?" he asks, with forced calmness.

"Yes, I mean all these things," she answers, looking at him with such wide, frank, innocent eyes that he can find no room for doubt.

He is puzzled for a moment.

"I have deceived myself," he sighs, inly. "I thought she was learning to love me."

"Lady Vera, I have been too hopeful," he says, manfully. "I have been thinking of love while you dreamed only of friendship. But now that you know my heart, will you not suffer me to woo you for my bride? I love you so dearly I am sure I could make you happy."

Ah! the fathomless pain that comes into the dark eyes into which he gazes so tenderly. He cannot understand it.

"I shall never marry, Captain Lockhart," she answers, in a low, pained voice. "There is no use to woo me. I can never be yours."

"Never!" he echoes, with despair in his voice.

"I shall never marry anyone," she repeats, mournfully.

He looks at her with all his passionate heart in his eyes.

"Never is a terrible word, Lady Vera," he answers sadly. "Only think how I love you. I have never loved anyone before in all my life, and I shall never love anyone again. You are my first and last love. Only think how terrible it is, how cruelly hard, for me to give up the hopes of winning you for my own. You are so beautiful and noble, my dark-eyed love. I have dreamed of kissing your small, white hands, your fair, white brow, your golden hair, even your beautiful, crimson lips. I had thought to win you for my very own, and now you strike dead every hope by that cruel word, never. Oh, my darling, you are too young to say you will never wed. What can you know of the needs of your own heart? Let me teach you to love me."

"Ah, if he only knew the fatal truth," the tortured young heart moans to itself, in the silence of its great despair. "If he knew that I am already bound by a tie that I hate and loathe."

But she speaks no word, only to look up at him with pained, dark eyes, and reiterate:

"I am very sorry I have caused you pain, Captain Lockhart, but I shall never marry."

He rises and looks down at her with his handsome face grown strangely pale and grave, his blue eyes dim and heavy.

"So be it, Lady Vera," he answers, folding his arms across his broad breast. "You know what is best for you, but, ah, lovely one, if you could know how sweet were the hopes you have slain this hour you could not choose but weep over my saddened life."

She put up her white hand imploringly.

"Forbear, Captain Lockhart. You cannot guess what pangs are aching in my breast or you would spare me your reproaches. Be pitiful and leave me."

"Not here," he says, looking up and down the flowery lane. "Let me take you back to the house, Lady Vera. We cannot trust these autumnal skies. It may rain at any moment."

"As you will," she answers, wearily, and rising, retraces her steps by his side. But this time they speak no word to each other and the fair young countess flies up to her room, and flings herself down on her couch to weep such tears as have never rained from those lovely eyes before, for a great happiness and a great sorrow have come into her life, as it were, together.

"For I love him," she moans to herself. "I love him, but as Heaven sees me, I did not know it. It all came to me like a flash when he was telling me how he loved me. Oh, God, what happiness is possible to me, and yet beyond my reach."

She lies still weeping bitterly, and recalling in all its bitterness that midnight marriage by the side of her dying mother.

"Oh! what a blind mistake it was," she weeps. "But for Leslie Noble I might marry the man I love. I might go back to America with him. I might tell him the story of my oath of vengeance, and he would help me to find my enemy and punish her for her sin."

The day drags wearily. In the afternoon Vera goes down to the library in search of something to read. Gliding softly in she finds it tenanted by Captain Lockhart, who is busy over a fresh batch of papers from the United States. He glances up as she is about withdrawing, and springs to his feet with courteous grace.

"Pray do not let me frighten you, Lady Vera. I will take my budget of papers, and be off," he exclaims.

"No, I do not wish to disturb you," she answers. "I am in search of something to read myself."

"Pray take your choice from among my papers," he replies, gravely, but kindly, and half-listlessly Lady Vera turns them over and selects one at random.

Captain Lockhart places a chair for her and returns to his reading, thinking that the best way to place her at her ease. His heart yearns over the beautiful, pale, suffering face, but he does not dream of her sorrow, and he has no right to comfort her, so he turns his glance away, and, looking round again a little later, sees that Countess Vera has quietly swooned away in her chair, and that the American newspaper has slipped from her lap to the floor.

With a startled cry that brings Lady Clive rushing into the room, he springs to his feet. Lady Vera's swoon is a long and deep one, and they wonder much over its cause, but no one dreams that the American newspaper has caused it all. Yet the listless gaze of the unhappy girl roving over the list of deaths in a Philadelphia paper has found one line that struck dumb, for a moment, the sources of life in their fountains. It was only this:

"Died, at his residence on Arch street, on the 19th instant Leslie Noble."