The Veiled Man by Ambrose Pratt — Read

It was not until five weeks after her mother's death that Lady Dorothy returned to Stayton. In the meanwhile she had been staying with her father in a little town in Southern France. She came back clad in deep mourning, and looking miserably thin and ill. Henceforth Cliff House was to be her home, for the Marquis had decided to give up the separate establishment in Curzon-street in which he had maintained his wife, and which, said rumor, he had never been able to properly afford. For that, however, poor Dorothy cared nothing. Indeed, her old butterfly had become, for the time being, a cruel memory, since in all her little social triumphs her dear dead mother had been tenderly associated; and in her absorbing sorrow, it seemed impossible to her that she could ever be glad and gay and irresponsible again.

Francine Toombes and many other of her female friends essayed to cheer her but Dorothy's affectionate and romantic nature had been stirred to its depths. She refused to be comforted, and she would not leave her home except to pay melancholy visits to her uncle, Sir Felix Grieg, a mourner too (for it was his sister who had died), or to wander among the graves in the churchyard on the hill. Pat Ellison, driven desperate by her obstinate gloom, had for a while relinquished his suit and gone abroad; and there was no other young man in Stayton who knew her intimately enough to intrude upon her grief, though many sighed for the courage they lacked in that direction. Lord Cawthorne was of that class. He became quite a pedestrian in those days, and his rambles always led him past the Cliff House and the cemetery gates, a mile beyond. Often he saw a drooping, black-clad figure, sitting with folded hands upon a fallen monument, gazing with pale face and rapt fixed eyes on space.