“He must have fallen in love with me at first sight! How charming! One must certainly be quite pretty to win a lover’s heart at first sight,” she thought, lingering before the mirror and noting each several charm with questioning eyes. She decided that, after all, she must be rather pretty, although she had not given much thought to it before, in the quiet days at Stony Ledge. Cousin Tabby and the twins had always insinuated that she would never “set the river afire with her beauty.” Perhaps they thought it wise to throw a damper on any little maidenly vanity that she might be cherishing. Now that they had wickedly thrown her upon the world they could not keep her ignorant of her charms any longer. She would read the truth in men’s eyes that she was wondrous fair. Doctor St. Clair had not hesitated to tell her so with eager lips. But she remembered his words with detestation, and thought only of the flash in Doctor Rupert’s eyes that told her without words she was lovely and adorable. She cared for his praise and no other, with her heart just awakened to love’s sweet song. How slowly the days passed in her uncongenial labor of caring for the wretched insane patients for the sake of daily bread, while the twins were fine and rich on gran’ther’s inheritance. Eva would have felt bitter over it, but she knew that her grandfather had not wished it to be so; that if she had gone for the lawyer as he wished that night she might have been his heiress. “I would not have left him alone for all the money in the State!” she murmured. CHAPTER XIX. UNDER A CLOUD. Eva would never forget the sunny May day when her lover returned to Weston. Everything was so green and lovely on the wide grounds, the sky was so bright and blue, the flowers so sweet, and the pretty feathered songsters in the trees were fairly splitting their very throats with joyful songs of love that found a happy echo in her heart. When Doctor Bertrand came into Eva’s ward that afternoon, she just happened to mention that Doctor Rupert had returned, and straightway the whole world was transformed, glorified, to Eva. Her eager heart leaped with joyful emotion and she turned her face quickly aside that no one might see the lovely crimson that overspread it at mention of his name. Doctor Bertrand just smiled to herself and passed on without a word to betray that her kind eyes had read the secret of two fond hearts. She thought it was a pretty love story that was going to end happily in a wedding, as all sweet love stories mostly ended. And she did not dream of the terrible barrier between those two yearning hearts--the barrier of a kinsman’s blood! For the carping world said that Doctor Ludington had murdered Terry Groves--that his hands were red with his foeman’s blood. No one excused him because it had really been an accident. They chose to put the worst construction on the tragedy.