It was a lovely June morning in the mountains of West Virginia, all Nature at her sweetest and fairest, and Leola had been planning such a happy, happy day; but when she came out from breakfast ready for her morning canter, there stood her saturnine old guardian asking her to step into the library for a moment before she rode away. Leola obeyed him, pouting, for she hated to lose time indoors this gladsome, golden day. There was no love lost between her and her grim guardian, anyway, for he was a stern old man, reticent and mysterious, spending most of his time in a horrid laboratory up in the tower chamber of the rough old stone house, where the country folk said he was working either to wrest from Nature the secret of making gold, or the still greater mystery of distilling a magic elixir of life. About the neighborhood he got the sobriquet Wizard Hermann, and looked the character with his lean, stooping form, long black hair floating over his coat collar, strongly marked features and cunning mouth, while his keen, gray eyes, under bushy brows, seemed to pierce one through with their questioning gaze. His ancestors had been pioneer Indian fighters, and the large house built of rough stone, just as taken from the quarry, dated back to the time when the red man roamed the almost unbroken forest. In all the years while Leola had lived here with her governess in the lonely old house, she could not remember a caress from the mysterious, self-absorbed old man, who seemed to have no human interests or passions, and to care for no one but the dwarfish servitor who helped him in his laboratory, the only person he ever admitted within its precincts. It was no wonder, then, that Leola followed Wizard Hermann unwillingly into the musty-smelling library, with its high walnut wainscot, dingy, green-stenciled walls, and side shelves lined with old leather volumes, while the bare oaken floor on which she trod was worn with the footsteps of successive generations who had passed from earth in the fullness of time and been gathered to their fathers. In the somber room with its closed shutters Leola stood facing her grim guardian with the impatient air of some beautiful young princess giving audience to a vassal. As he stood hesitating where to begin, with an unwonted diffidence, she said, coldly: “Speak; tell me your wish at once, sir, for I must hurry. I have an engagement in town with my dressmaker.” At those words Wizard Hermann’s gloomy brow cleared as if by magic, and quickly striking his lean, scarred hands together, he retorted, maliciously: “An engagement with your dressmaker, eh, my proud lady? Very well, while you are there you may give the woman an order for your wedding gown.” “Sir,” she uttered, in amazement, her cheeks reddening. Wizard Hermann retorted, with a hoarse, sardonic laugh: “I said give the woman an order for your wedding gown, Leola Mead, for you are to be married soon.”