“Yes; I will, I will, dear Rose,” said Cora, gazing down through blinding tears, as she stooped and pressed her warm lips on the death-cold lips beneath them.

Rose lifted her failing eyes to Cora’s sympathetic face and never moved them more; there they became fixed.

The sound of approaching wheels was heard.

“It is my grandfather.  Go and tell him,” whispered Cora to old Martha without turning her head.

The woman left the room, and in a few moments Mr. Rockharrt entered it, leaning on the arm of his valet.

When he approached the bed, he saw how it was and asked no questions.  He went to the side opposite to that occupied by Cora, and bent over the dying woman.

“Rose,” he said in a low voice—­“Rose, my child.”

She was past answering, past hearing.  He took her thin, chill hand in his, but it was without life.

He bent still lower over her, and whispered: 

“Rose.”

But she never moved or murmured.

Her eyes were fixed in death on those of Cora.

Then suddenly a smile came to the dying face, light dawned in the dying eyes, as she lifted them and gazed away beyond Cora’s form, and murmuring contented;

“Father, father—­” and

    “With a sigh of a great deliverance,”

she fell asleep.

They stood in silence over the dead for a few moments, and then Mr. Rockharrt drew the white coverlet up over the ashen face, and then leaning on the arm of his servant went out of the room.

Three days later the mortal remains of Rose Rockharrt were laid in the cemetery at North End.

It was on the first of November, a week after the funeral, that Mr. Rockharrt, for the first time in three months, went to the works.

On that day, while Cora sat alone in the parlor, a card was brought to her—­

“The Duke of Cumbervale.”

The Duke of Cumbervale entered the parlor.

Cora rose to receive him; the blood rushing to her head and suffusing her face with blushes, merely from the vivid memory of the painful past called up by the sudden sight of the man who had been the unconscious cause of all her unhappiness.  Most likely the old lover mistook the meaning of the lady’s agitation in his presence, and ascribed it to a self-flattering origin.

However that might have been, he advanced with easy grace, and bowing slightly, said: 

“My dear Mrs. Rothsay, I am very happy to see you again!  I hope I find you quite well?”

“Quite well, thank you,” she replied, recovering her self-control.

In the ensuing conversation, Cora made known her grandfather’s accident and the death of Rose.

“I am truly grieved to have intruded at so inopportune a time,” asserted the visitor, and arose to take leave.

Then Cora’s conscience smote her for her inhospitable rudeness.  Here was a man who had crossed the sea at her grandfather’s invitation, who had reached the country in ignorance of the family trouble; who had come directly from the seaport to North End, and ridden from North End to Rockhold—­a distance of six or seven miles; and she had scarcely given him a civil reception.  And now should she let him go all the way back to North End without even offering him some refreshment?