"Yes, as a rule, a beautiful face has a wonderful influence. I have known women without a tithe of your beauty, Leone, rise from quite third-rate society to find a place among the most exclusive and noblest people in the land. Your face would win for you, darling, an entrance anywhere." "The only thing I want my face to do," she said, "is to please your mother." "And that, when she sees it, it is quite sure to do," replied the lover-husband. "Lance," said Lady Chandos, "what shall we do if your parents will neither forgive us nor see us?" "It will be very uncomfortable," said Lord Chandos; "but we shall have to bear it. It will not much matter so far as worldly matters are concerned; when I am of age I shall have a separate and very handsome fortune of my own. My mother will soon want to know you when you become the fashion--as you will, Leone." So she dismissed the future from her mind. She would not think of it. She had blind reliance, blind confidence in her husband; he seemed so carelessly happy and indifferent she could not think there was anything vitally wrong. She was so unutterably happy, so wonderfully, thoroughly happy. Her life was a poem, the sweetest love-story ever written or sung. "Why am I so happy?" she would ask herself at times; "why has Heaven given me so much? all I ever asked for--love and happiness?" She did not know how to be grateful enough. One morning in autumn, a warm, beautiful morning, when the sun shone on the rich red and brown foliage--they were out together on the fair river--the tide was rising and the boat floated lazily on the stream. Lady Chandos wore a beautiful dress of amber and black that suited her dark, brilliant beauty to perfection. She lay back among the velvet cushions, smiling as her eyes lingered on the sky, the trees, the stream. "You look very happy, Leone," said Lord Chandos. "I am very happy," she replied. "I wrote to my uncle yesterday, Lance. I should like to send him a box filled with everything he likes best." "You shall, if it pleases you, my darling," he answered. She leaned over the side of the boat watching the water, drawing her hand through the clear stream. "Happy," she repeated, rather to herself than to him; "I can safely say this, that I have had so much happiness since I have been here that if I were wretched all my life afterward I should still have had far more happiness than falls to the lot of many people." She remembered those words in after years; and she owned to herself that they had been most perfectly true. The few months passed at River View had been most perfectly happy--no shade of care had come over her, no doubt, no fear--nothing that chilled the warmth of her love, nothing that marred its perfect trust. In some lives there comes a pause of silent, intense bliss just before the storm, even as the wind rests before the hurricane.