She has refused him, too. She is too cold and proud to love any one, he tells himself.
"Are you really going to-morrow, Lockhart?" Lord Gordon asks him in the drawing-room, that evening.
"Yes, I am really going," he answers, and never dreams of the wild throb Lady Vera's heart gives beneath its silken bodice.
"Why don't you ask me to go with you?" Lord Gordon continues, good-naturedly. "I have long contemplated a tour of the United States. I am ennuyed to death. I should like a taste of a different life."
"I shall be glad of your company, and you will be quite likely to have a taste of something different if you go with me," laughs Captain Lockhart. "Father writes me that my regiment may be ordered out on the plains to fight the Indians next month."
"Ugh! those horrid savages!" the ladies cry, all but Lady Vera.
She raises the black satin fan a little higher before her face, and leans back in her chair, indifferent, to all appearance, but, oh, with such a deadly pain tearing at her heart-strings.
"To lose him like this," she moans to herself, "it is too dreadful. Oh, if I had even ten minutes alone with him, I would make him understand the truth. He should not leave me!"
But Captain Lockhart, stealing a furtive glance at the beautiful face in its high-bred repose, tells himself sadly:
"She is utterly indifferent to what fate I meet. Beautiful as she is, she must be utterly heartless."