am some new creature without a history, and not that Dora Wyllard who was once mistress of Penmorval.
"I wish you and Bothwell would take your honeymoon holiday in the South, and spend a week or two here with me. There is plenty of accommodation for you in these grand old apartments of mine—a first-floor of a dozen rooms, all large and lofty. My old servants keep everything in exquisite order, and are devoted in their attention to me.
"It was a pleasure to me to see your brother when he was staying in Florence. Tell him that I left Vallombrosa only a week ago, and was very sorry to come away from wood and mountain even then."
Hilda and her husband accepted this friendly invitation, and spent half their honeymoon on the road to Florence, and the other half in that picturesque city. They found Dora the shadow of her former self. She had a gentle air of resignation, a pensive placidity which was inexpressibly touching. She never mentioned her dead husband. She was full of thoughtfulness for others, and had made herself the adored benefactress of a little colony of poor Florentines. She had furnished her rooms and established herself in a manner which indicated the intention to make a permanent home in the city; and here Bothwell and his wife left her, with deep regret.
"Will you never come back to Cornwall, Dora?" Hilda asked piteously, in the last farewell moments at the railway-station.
"Never is a long word, dearest. I suppose I shall see the old places again some day; but I must be a good deal older than I am now—a good deal further away from my old sorrows."
Dora spoke without reckoning upon that Providence which shapes our ends in spite of us; and happily for the cause of true love, Providence found a way of bringing Dora Wyllard back to Cornwall much sooner than she had intended to return.
A little more than a year after Bothwell and his wife left Florence, the happy home at Trevena was darkened by the shadow of an awful fear. A son had been born to Bothwell Grahame; and before the boy was a week old the young mother was in imminent danger of death. Edward Heathcote was in Italy, spending his autumn holiday, going over much of the same ground that he had visited before, and loitering longer and later than the previous year. A telegram from Bothwell told him of his sister's peril; and another telegram reached Mrs. Wyllard from the same source. Moved by the same impulse, Dora and Heathcote met at the station, each on the same errand, bent on starting by the first train for Paris. They travelled together in sad and silent companionship, each oppressed by the fear of a great calamity.
Heathcote had telegraphed before he started, asking for a
