It was far into October now, and the autumn leaves were turning from red and gold to russet-brown and whirling through the chilly air; the nuts were ripe in the woods, and in the city streets people began to appear in warm clothing and furs; and Italy remembered that it was in the waning days of the bright summer that she had gone on that fatal little sailing trip with Francis Murray--far back in the last of summer since she had heard his voice, full of love and yearning, calling her “love,” “darling,” then fading out into the silence of a terrible mystery. She awoke one stormy midnight, weeping, from a dreadful nightmare dream in which she had seen Francis Murray lying dead and cold upon the beach at Winthrop. It was storming wildly outdoors, and the noise had seemed to her, in her sleep, like the rush of waves that threw that pallid, drowned corpse at her feet. Italy flung herself, in her dream, upon the cold, dead form and kissed the glorious face that she had never kissed in life--kissed the closed eyes, the marble-white brow, the cold, stiff lips that had called her in that last, supreme moment, “love,” “darling.” “Oh, I love you, I love you!” she cried out to the dead, and then she awoke, weeping wildly. She heard the wild rain swirling against the windows, and the gale shrieking around the corners of the streets. In the darkness she groped her way to the window and looked through the curtains into the street. By the white electric lights she saw the swirling sheets of rain go dashing past, swept by the cyclonic force of the wind, and the branches of the leafless trees bending and writhing and snapping off as though in the embrace of a gigantic monster. With a shudder she dropped the curtains together and crouched miserably upon the floor, her face in her hands. “Oh, how dreadful it is, how dreadful--yet not so terrible as my dream!” she moaned. “Oh, is he dead, dead, and lost forever? Or did I wrong him with my wild suspicions? Was he noble and true, as he seemed? Who, then, was the fiend that murdered my father? Not Francis Murray, ah, no, no, no! Let me do him justice, now that he is dead. He was not the fiend I came here to find. He was noble, godlike, and I--loved him. Yes, I loved him from the first hour we met. I realize it now, in the darkness of my great despair.” She thought of the bereaved mother, alone and lonely in the splendid home at Winthrop, and her heart yearned over her.