Neva started and looked at him with her grave, serious eyes. He appeared to advantage in his new garments, and his face was pale and worn by the day’s dissipation. His sorrows and his sickness had given him a refined look to which he was not fully and fairly entitled, and his eyes met hers frankly and honestly, with a real admiration in their gaze. Neva’s cheeks flushed slightly, and her heart fluttered. Clearly Rufus Black had not made an unfavorable impression upon her in that first glance. They turned and walked slowly up the path together, entering the avenue. Rufus tried to conquer his unwonted awkwardness, and singularly impressed with Neva’s beauty, exerted himself to please her. They sauntered on, stopping now and then to gather ferns or flowers, and when they emerged from the park upon the lawn, they were chatting gayly, and on the best of terms with each other. And yet the heart of each was strangely sore. Neva thought of what “might have been,” and sighed in her inmost soul that the husband her father was supposed by her to have chosen for her was not the one her heart most longed for. And Rufus mourned as bitterly as ever in his soul for his lost young wife, and felt that he should never be comforted. Craven Black and Lady Wynde watched them as they approached the house, and the lip of the former curled, as he muttered: “So fade the griefs of the young! Unstable as water, Rufus is already this girl’s lover!” “They are mutually pleased,” murmured Lady Wynde. “Her father’s supposed wishes and this young man’s interesting melancholy will soon efface Lord Towyn’s image from Neva’s mind, if it has made any impression there.” It seemed indeed as if the opinion of the worldly-wise conspirators would be justified. The young couple halted upon the lawn, and Neva’s gravity and the melancholy of Rufus began to disappear, when the lodge gates swung open, and three gentleman came riding up the avenue. The long twilight had begun, and even Neva’s keen eyes could not recognize the new-comers at that distance, and she chatted merrily to Rufus, who answered as lightly. But as the horsemen came nearer, and Neva regarded them more closely, a sudden silence fell upon her, and a strange shyness seized her. It was a critical movement in the progress of the game which Craven Black and Lady Wynde were playing, and these new-comers had arrived in time to give a new turn to it. For Neva recognized them as the three guardians of her property--Sir John Freies, Mr. Atkins, and the young Lord Towyn! CHAPTER XV. MR. BLACK GETS A NEW IDEA. As Neva recognized the youngest of her three guardians, as they rode up the avenue of Hawkhurst at a leisurely pace, a strange embarrassment seized upon her. The horsemen had not yet seen her in the twilight and the shadow of shrubbery, and she proposed a return to the drawing-room. Rufus Black assented, and they passed in at the open French window which gave directly upon the marble terrace.