"I have no husband," Lady Vera answers, disdainfully, with a smouldering fire in her great, dark eyes. She accuses herself of no falsehood in uttering those words, for she never means to acknowledge Leslie Noble's claim upon her, and she has mentally decided that if she ever goes free again she will appeal to the strong arm of the law to sever the hated bonds that hold her. After that one flash of wrath she subsides into mournful apathy again. Two weeks more roll by into the irrevocable past. Lady Vera droops more and more, like some gently fading rose. Betsy Robson, frightened and alarmed, sees that her hold on life is slowly loosening day by day. The flowers she brings her from the tangled, neglected garden fall lightly from her grasp, as if her hands were too weak to hold them. She lies all day on her couch now, too weak or too weary to rise, and the snowy pillow day by day is drenched with her languid, hopeless tears. "It is too bad that Mr. Noble does not come," Mrs. Robson mutters to herself. "His poor young wife is dying, I honestly think. She has gone so thin and white, and her big, black eyes frighten one with their uncanny look. She has fretted herself to death. It goes on to seven weeks now since he brought her here. I wonder if aught has happened him? I do wish I could let him know some way that she's a-dying." The last days of August have passed now. September comes in cool and blustery, inclining to storms. With every day Lady Vera sinks more and more, complaining of no pain or disease, only growing weaker and weaker, paler and thinner, while, as Mrs. Robson says, her great, black eyes look unearthly in her death-white face. If Leslie Noble does not come soon his captive will escape him through the open gates of death. "It's a-going to storm to-night, Tab," remarks Mrs. Robson to her familiar, as she opens the kitchen door and peers out into the gathering darkness one chilly night; "the moon looks pale and watery, and the clouds keeps scudding over it. There isn't any stars to speak of, and the wind's blustery and damp. It's a-going to storm. You may blink and purr by the fire alone to-night, Tabby, for I must sit up with poor Mrs. Noble. It wouldn't be right to leave the poor, crazy creetur alone, ill as she is, and seems that harmless a body could hardly believe that she stuck a knife into her own husband. Yes, I'll set up with her to-night. Sometimes the spirits ride on storms to carry away the souls of them that's a-dying, and mayhap they may come for that poor young thing's to-night." She closes the door with a shudder of superstitious terror in the face of the gathering storm, and betakes herself to the gloomy upper chamber where Countess Vera, still robed in the gray silk dress in which she had been brought from her home a captive, lies silently across the gloomy, crimson-hung bed, as white and still as if she were already dead.