"I hardly think so. Please ask me no questions," the girl said, uncomfortable with blushing. "As you like. It is veiled in mystery," he said, rather piqued. "At least, you won't mind informing me if she got any of her ideas of me from you. No, that is hardly fair. I will alter it. Did you and she ever speak of me together?" "What if I tell you yes, and that, every time we met?" exclaimed Miss Ainger, plucking up courage when thus driven into a corner. To her surprise and dismay, Vance took this admission quite otherwise than she had meant it. In Eve's attitude toward him, he thought he read a girlish jealousy of the object preoccupying the affections of her friend. "I see. I understand," he said, with a gleam in his eyes she had not seen there in all of their acquaintance. Until now, the hearth-rug had been between them. With an animation quite foreign to him, he crossed it, and leaned down to take her hands. At once, Kitty, withdrawing from his grasp, rose to her feet and faced him. "I think there is some great mistake," she said, very quietly. As Vance gazed at her, he became aware that he had until now never seen the true Kitty Ainger, and that her face was beautiful. "You repulse me? You have never cared for me?" he said, fiercely. A wave of color came upon her cheeks, and her eyes dropped before his to the violets in her hand. "I must tell you," she said, after a pause, during which both thought of many things stretching back through many years, "that I have just promised to marry Mr. Crawford." Chapter II The day of Miss Ainger's marriage with Crawford, which took place in New York, a month later than the events heretofore recorded, found Vance Townsend on horseback in Virginia, following, with no especial purpose, a highway that crosses the Blue Ridge Mountains to descend sharply into the valley of the Shenandoah. Before leaving home, he had acquitted himself of conventional duty to the bride by ordering to be sent to her the finest antique vase of his collection,--a gem of carved metal that Cellini might have signed,--filled with boughs of white lilac, his card and best wishes accompanying it. Then, with a heart overburdened, as he fancied, with regretful self-reproach, he had turned his back upon the chief might-have-been of his experience. Katherine, who had, in fact, passed many days in her paternal mansion unsought by him, was now invested with a veil of tender sentiment. In his waistcoat pocket he carried an unfinished poem, addressed to her,--or to an idealized version of Miss Ainger,--which, at intervals on his journey, he would take out and polish and shape with assiduity, forgetting sometimes to sigh over it in his zeal for metrical construction.