“It’s just come from the Villa, 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 words that tortured her.

It could not be true—­it could not be true!  Stafford had not written it.  It was some cruel jest, a very cruel jest, perpetrated by someone who hated them both, and who wantonly inflicted pain.  Yes; that was it!  That could be the only explanation.  Someone had written in his name; it was a forgery; she would meet Stafford presently, and they would laugh at it together.  He would be very angry, would want to punish the person who had done it; but he and she would laugh together, and he would take her in his arms and kiss her in one of the many ways in which he had made a kiss an ecstasy of delight, and they would laugh together as he whispered that nothing should ever separate them.