"I am sure I shall be delighted," she declares. "And Sir Harry is usually of the same mind as I am. It must be perfectly lovely now down at Fairvale. And the children would be delighted, I know."
"I am all the more willing to accept Lady Vera's invitation to Fairvale, because I think it necessary that she should examine her father's letters and papers if he has left any," declares Sir Harry, diffidently. "If he has left any confession bearing on the subject of her supposed death and burial, it is most important that she should be in possession of it."
"Why?" asks the young countess, looking at him with a slightly startled air.
"For this reason," he answers. "In the face of your enemies' confident assertion of Vera Noble's death and burial, and your own denial of it, matters have assumed a strange aspect! Mrs. Cleveland and her daughter declare you to be an impostor whom the Earl of Fairvale has palmed off as his child. There are some who could very easily be brought to believe that story."
"Whom?" Lady Vera asks, wonderingly.
"The person who would be most benefited if such a charge could be proven true—the next heir to the title and estates of Fairvale," Sir Harry answers, gravely.
"Oh, dear!" cries Lady Clive, anxiously, and Vera says, with paling lips:
"You do not mean that—that——"
"I ought to tell you, Lady Vera, what I have heard," he answers, interrupting her incoherent question. "Shall I do so?"