--the odious person who took her away
from Brighton--not to let his daughter come to the court during the
trial. He refused to hold any communication with her whatever."

I remembered what Mrs Fyne had told me before of the view she had years
ago of de Barral clinging to the child at the side of his wife's grave
and later on of these two walking hand in hand the observed of all eyes
by the sea. Pictures from Dickens--pregnant with pathos.

PART ONE, CHAPTER 6.

FLORA.

"A Very singular prohibition," remarked Mrs Fyne after a short silence.
"He seemed to love the child."

She was puzzled. But I surmised that it might have been the sullenness
of a man unconscious of guilt and standing at bay to fight his
"persecutors," as he called them; or else the fear of a softer emotion
weakening his defiant attitude; perhaps, even, it was a self-denying
ordinance, in order to spare the girl the sight of her father in the
dock, accused of cheating, sentenced as a swindler--proving the
possession of a certain moral delicacy.

Mrs Fyne didn't know what to think. She supposed it might have been
mere callousness. But the people amongst whom the girl had fallen had
positively not a grain of moral delicacy. Of that she was certain.
Mrs Fyne could not undertake to give me an idea of their abominable
vulgarity. Flora used to tell her something of her life in that
household, over there, down Limehouse way. It was incredible. It
passed Mrs Fyne's comprehension. It was a sort of moral savagery which
she could not have thought possible.

I, on the contrary, thought it very possible. I could imagine easily
how the poor girl must have been bewildered and hurt at her reception in
that household--envied for her past while delivered defenceless to the
tender mercies of people without any fineness either of feeling or mind,
unable to understand her misery, grossly curious, mistaking her manner
for disdain, her silent shrinking for pride. The wife of the "odious
person" was witless and fatuously conceited. Of the two girls of the
house one was pious and the other a romp; both were coarse-minded--if
they may be credited with any mind at all. The rather numerous men of
the family were dense and grumpy, or dense and jocose. None in that
grubbing lot had enough humanity to leave her alone. At first she was
made much of, in an offensively patronising manner. The connection with
the great de Barral gratified their vanity even in t