aced,
and the disadvantages that had caused her to differ from other girls.

Lorna's family was the smallest possible, for it consisted only of her
father. Nobody at the Villa Camellia had ever seen Mr. Carson--not even
Miss Rodgers. He had communicated with her by writing when he wished to
place his daughter at the school, but he had never paid a single visit
to Fossato. He pleaded stress of business as the excuse for this
remissness, but Lorna herself knew only too well that he had no
intention of coming. Except to the office at which he was employed he
never went to any place where he would be likely to meet English
visitors. The furnished rooms where he lived were in the strictly
Italian portion of Naples, and not in the vicinity of the big hotels.
Secretly Lorna dreaded her holidays. There was nothing for her to do
while her father was at the office. She was not allowed to go out alone,
and unless she could induce fat Signora Fiorenza, their landlady, to be
philanthropic and chaperon her to look at the shops, she was obliged to
amuse herself in the house during the day as best she could. In the
evening things were certainly better. Her father would take her to dine
at an Italian restaurant, and would sometimes treat her to a performance
at a theater or cinema close at hand, or would escort her for a
lamplight walk along the streets, but these brief expeditions were
evidently made out of a sense of duty, and Mr. Carson was plainly
unhappy until he was once more ensconced in his own sitting-room with
his favorite books and his reading-lamp. He had seen so little of his
daughter during the five years they had lived at Naples that, though in
a sense he was fond of her, she was more of an embarrassment to him than
an asset. Lorna realized this only too keenly. Her sensitive disposition
shrank away from her father. She was shy in his presence, and never knew
what to say to him. She seemed always aware of some enormous shadow that
hung over their lives and darkened the daylight. What this was she had
no means of guessing, but it was emphatically there. She had learned, by
bitter experience, never to ask to be taken to the fashionable portions
of the city; she knew that the sound of a voice speaking English at a
neighboring table was enough to cause her father to finish his meal in a
hurry and leave the restaurant. They never went to the British Church,
and even such cosmopolitan spots as the aquarium or the museum were
eq