The world is naught when one is gone Who was the world. Then the heart breaks That this is last that once was won. He hurried to his bachelor lodgings. He had written to his servants to make ready for his coming. From there he wrote, by and by, the note to Cora announcing his return, and his intention of calling on her that evening. He hurried to Mrs. Dalrymple’s mansion that evening, but while he waited for Cora’s entrance, a sad-faced servant informed him that she would be with him as soon as she could leave her aunt, who was so ill that she was not expected to survive the night. A rush of surprise and grief over this startling news drove his own troubles, temporarily, from the young man’s mind. Five minutes later Cora hurried into the room, superbly attired, dabbing her eyes with a damp handkerchief, inwardly thankful that this show of grief would account for the vanished luster of her once bright orbs. “Frank, dearest!” she cried, throwing herself upon his breast. They sat down a little apart from each other by his own maneuver, while he said anxiously: “This distressing news of Mrs. Dalrymple has driven everything else out of my head. Is it really so bad, Cora?” “It is the strangest case I ever heard of, Frank. Aunt Verna has been steadily declining for long months of a malady so obscure that no doctor can diagnose it, and she declares herself that it is a breaking heart.” “Oh, how sad, how pitiful!” he cried, and his thoughts returned to the day when he had seen her bending, a sad, black-draped figure, over her daughter’s bier. So this was the cruel end. His betrothed continued sorrowfully: “It will break my heart to lose my dear Aunt Verna, even though I shall be the heiress of all her millions!” She thought it was a good idea to remind him slyly of this fact, but he looked at her coldly. “You should not be counting on such things, Cora. It sounds mercenary,” he said, rebukingly, while all the while his eyes were taking in the change that had come over her once brilliant beauty--faded like a rose that has languished in the withering heat of an August day. She looked at him reproachfully: “Oh, Frank, I did not mean it that way, I love Aunt Verna dearly, and I am praying that she will not die.” “Is there the slightest hope?” “The doctors say if she had some shock to arouse her and draw her thoughts from herself, it might do good, but she cares about nothing. She has not shown any animation to-day, except a faint spark of interest when I told her you were coming.” “I should so love to see her again. Shall I have that sad pleasure?” he asked, eager to escape from the tête-à-tête interview with Cora, now that he could not tax her at once with her treachery. “She asked that you should come to her a while,” Cora answered, and then added sobbingly: “But have you nothing more to say to me, dear Frank, after your long absence? How cold and careless you seem.”