The dark eyes, fast glazing over with the film of death, grow hard and stern. "Vera, child of my martyred wife, will you be false to your father's dying trust? Will you refuse to obey his dying commands?" "No, father, no," she weeps. "Then place your hand on this Bible, my darling." Silently she obeys him, the pale, chill light of the waning day glimmering in on her ghost-like, pallid face, and the dark eyes full of pain and despair. And the voice of the dying man rises strangely on the utter stillness. "Swear, Vera, swear by all your hopes of happiness, that you will punish Marcia Cleveland through her dearest affections, that at any cost to yourself you will avenge your mother's wrongs!" A gasp; the words die on Lady Vera's parched tongue. "Speak, my little countess. Repeat my words," he urges, anxiously. With a terrible effort she murmurs them over: "I swear, by all my hopes of happiness, that I will punish Marcia Cleveland through her dearest affections; that at any cost to myself I will avenge my mother's wrongs!" She glances down at the loved face for his smile of approval. An icy hand seems to clutch her heart. Her father has died as the last words left her lips--died with a smile of triumph on his marble-white face! One piercing cry of anguish, and the Countess of Fairvale falls lifeless across the still warm body of the dead. CHAPTER XIII. Long days of illness for Lady Fairvale follow upon the tragic episode of her father's death. Nights and days go by like utter blanks to her, with only slightly recurring intervals of consciousness. It has been a great shock to her, this swift and terrible rending apart of the last filial tie earth holds for her. Near kindred she has none. Her father's death has seemed to leave her utterly alone on earth. It is true there is some distant cousin and heir-at-law who would, no doubt, take it as a favor if she would die and leave him title and estates, but him she knows not. "There is no one living who has the least claim upon my affection," she thinks, forlornly, to herself that day, when, with agonized heart she bends to press the last farewell kiss on her father's marble lips; but even with the words a sudden memory stabs her heart and crushes her senseless to the floor with the silent whisper of one name--Leslie Noble! That feared and dreaded name has power to blanch poor Vera's cheek and drive the blood from her heart at any moment. "What if, dazzled by my wealth and title, he should come and claim me?" is her dreadful thought, never dreaming of that stately monument in fair and flowery Glenwood, on which Leslie Noble has caused to be inscribed the simple name of: "VERA, WIFE OF LESLIE NOBLE. Died, ---- --th, 18--; aged 17." thus trying to atone to the dead in some slight measure for the pitiful, unmanly cowardice that had driven her desperate.