Miss Ida," she said. "And oh, miss,
what I told you this morning--it's quite true. It was Mr. Stafford's
own groom as brought the note, and he says that his master is engaged
to Miss Falconer, and that the whole place is in excitement over it. He
was as proud as Punch, Miss Ida; for he says that his new mistress is
terrible rich as well as beautiful, and that there'll be the grandest
of grand doings up there."

The blood rushed to Ida's face for a moment, then faded, and she
slipped the note into the pocket of her habit and laughed. For it
sounded too ridiculous, too incredible to cause her even a shadow of
annoyance. She gave one or two orders to Jason, then went into the
hall, took the note from her pocket and looked at the address lovingly,
lingeringly: for instinctively she knew whose hand had written it. It
was the first letter she had received from him; what would it say to
her? No doubt it was to tell her why he had not been able to meet her
that morning, to ask her to meet him later in the day. With a blush of
maidenly shame she lifted the envelope to her lips and kissed each
written word.

Then she opened it, slowly, as lingeringly as she had looked at it,
spinning out the pleasure, the delight which lay before her in the
perusal of her first love-letter. With her foot upon the old-fashioned
fender, her head drooping as if there was someone present to see her
blushes, she read the letter; and it is not too much to say that at
first she failed utterly to grasp its meaning. With knit brows and
quaking heart, she read it again and again, until its significance was,
so to speak, forced upon her; then the letter dropped from her hand,
her arms fell limply to her sides, and she looked straight before her
in a dazed, benumbed fashion, every word burning itself upon her brain
and searing her heart.

The blow had fallen so suddenly, so unexpectedly, like a bolt from the
blue, smiting the happiness of her young life as a sapling is smitten
by summer lightning, that for the moment she felt no pain, nothing but
the benumbing of all her faculties; so that she did not see the
portrait of the dead and gone Heron upon which her eyes rested, did not
hear her father's voice calling to her from the library, was conscious
of nothing but those terrible words which were dinning through her
brain like the booming of a great bell. Presently she uttered a low cry
and clasped her head with her hand, as if to shut out the sound of the