"O Roland darling!" said she, with a little laugh, as they stood together in a window of the château one evening in the spring, looking towards Montreal steeped in the sunset, and where the greenery of the woods was deepening faster than it ever does in Britain at the same season, vegetation maturing with wondrous rapidity the moment the snow disappears; "O, Roland--I am poor as yourself now, and yet you still talk of marrying me and going to India; but could I take my poor mamma there?" Roland's loving countenance fell. "You lost your noble estate by a will; I my seigniory--or nearly all of it--by civil war; our fortune is ruined." "Yet--we must not--cannot part, after all--after all!" "Oh no--no!" murmured the girl, fondly and plaintively, with her sweet face pillowed on his breast. Next day Roland arrived with a face full of such excitement, wonder, and so many varying expressions, that Aurelia knew not what to make of him and his incoherences for some time at least. That morning the regimental postman brought him a letter, the first words of which, however much expected, made a lump rise in his throat. It was from his legal agents, Messrs. Hook and Crook, Writers to the Signet, and dated from Edinburgh:-- "DEAR SIR,"--(It used to be _my_ dear sir once) "We beg to acquaint you, with much regret, that we have now traced out and learned authentically who are _the heirs of the marriage of your deceased uncle_, the late Mr. Philip Ruthven, eldest son of General Roland Ruthven, who went to Jamaica." Roland felt very sick as he read, and paused; then summing up courage, he resumed the obnoxious epistle, and read on. "From the latter place that gentleman went to Canada, where he married a lady of Montreal, by whom he had several children, all of whom are dead save one, Miss Aurelia Darnel de St. Eustache" ("Oh, my God!" thought Roland, "what miracle is this?"), for he took the name of Darnel to please the family of his wife, who was the daughter of a wealthy French seigneur. "We regret to be the medium of such very bad news, but of course are now taking the usual legal measures to execute the will of the late General Ruthven, according to your own instructions." So Aurelia was his cousin, the daughter of the lost Philip, who had quitted Scotland in disgust, never to return, and she was the heiress of Ardgowrie! And he--what was he? For weal or woe her affianced husband. It was all like the plot of a drama; and some time elapsed before Roland could realise the whole situation; but there was the prosaic letter of the lawyers, which, under _other_ circumstances, might have seemed to cut his very heart-strings. Now how innocuous it was!