But that promise of love and truth and remembrance uttered by Georgie Stanfield on the sands at Fishbourne, under the yellow harvest-moon, with her head pillowed on Charles Mitford's breast and her arms clasped round his neck, came from a young heart which had known no guile, and was kept as religiously as was Sir Galahad's vow of chastity. Within a year after Charley's departure for Oxford, his father's affairs, which, as it afterwards appeared, had long been in hopeless confusion, became irretrievably involved. The bank stopped payment, and the old man, unable to face the storm of ignominy by which he imagined he should be assailed, committed suicide. The smash was complete; Charles had to leave the University, and became entirely dependent on his uncle, Sir Percy Mitford, who declined to see him, but offered to purchase for him a commission in a marching regiment, and to allow him fifty pounds a year. The young man accepted the offer; and by the same post wrote to Georgie, telling her all, and giving her the option of freeing herself from the engagement. It Was a gentlemanly act; but a cheap bit of generosity, after all. He might have staked the fifty pounds a year his uncle had promised him, on the fidelity of such a girl as Georgie Stanfield, more especially in the time of trouble. Her father, too, with his old disregard of the future, entirely approved of his daughter's standing by her lover under the circumstances of his altered fortune; and two letters--one breathing a renewal of love and trust, the other full of encouragement and hope--went away from Fishbourne parsonage, and brought tears into the eyes of their recipient, as he sat on the edge of a truckle-bed in a whitewashed room in Canterbury Barracks. The vow of constancy and its renewal were two little epochs in Georgie's quiet life. Then, not very long after the occurrence of the last,--some six months,--there came a third, destined never to be forgotten. There had been no letter from Charley for some days, and Georgie had been in the habit of walking across the lawn to meet the postman and question him over the garden-wall.