Until the last moment of his life, Ronald remembered parting with Lady Hermione. How, when the final moment came, her womanly tenderness overcame everything else and she said such words to him as he never forgot! For the first time she told him how deeply, how truly, how passionately she loved him, for the first time he saw and understood the adoration she lavished upon him, and then, with those words still ringing in his ears, he kissed her lips. The next moment he was gone and Lady Alden lay in the long grass, sobbing alone! CHAPTER XXXIV. THE TOWERS. The Towers, Kenelm Eyrle’s inheritance, was a large estate. Perhaps the prettiest and most picturesque part of it was that called Dower House, a large, open, healthy, airy house, standing by itself, close to the Holme Woods. The Dower House had been, in former generations, a retreat for the widowed ladies of the family, but of late there had been no widows, and the place had gone somewhat to decay. It was quite isolated; there was no other dwelling near it, no cheerful path led to a highway, no neighboring chimneys peeped from between the trees. It was isolated, solitary, secluded--the very spot where one might live and die unseen and unknown. Kenelm Eyrle had more than once looked at the large closed, solitary place, and thought how sad it was that it should go to decay. There were no widowed Ladies Eyrle to seek refuge there now, and the really good, substantial property was rapidly going to ruin. Owing to the size of his estate, and his own peculiar ideas, Kenelm had always employed a land agent, a gentleman of intelligence and shrewdness, who made The Towers one of the best paying estates in the country. If Mr. Gordon had any fault to find with his employer it was for the little interest he took in anything. “I do not believe he would care,” said Mr. Gordon one day, “if we found a gold mine on the property. He would raise his eyebrows one-quarter of an inch and say, ‘Indeed!’ As for being pleased or excited over it--nothing of the kind.” To Mr. Gordon a man who did not care for money was simply a blot on creation. “I have sometimes been so successful,” he would say, “in different works on the estate, that Mr. Eyrle has found himself a thousand pounds the richer for it! But he never cared; he never seemed pleased. If, as has seldom happened, we have been unsuccessful, and have lost, it was just the same.” But Mr. Gordon, like the sensible man that he was, had suggested one thing--it was the letting of the Dower House. “I know you dislike the idea of strangers about the property,” he said, “but it seems to me a sin to let such a beautiful place as that go to ruin.” Mr. Eyrle smiled the melancholy smile that was so habitual with him. “Go and live there yourself,” he replied, and Mr. Gordon gravely assured him that if he were not married there was no place he would prefer to it.