when the future looks brighter to speak of the
sorrows of the past!

This task of secrecy was not a difficult one. Dalton's was not a nature
to speculate on possible mischances so much as to hope for impossible
good turns of fortune; and when he knew that Kate had sent him money,
and Frank did not ask for any, the measure of his contentment was
filled. Kate was a Princess, and Frank an officer of hussars; and that
they were as happy as the day was long he would have taken an oath
before any "justice of the quorum," simply because he saw no reason why
they ought not to be so; and when he drank their healths every day after
dinner, and finished a bumper of champagne to their memory, he perfectly
satisfied his conscience that he had discharged every parental duty in
their behalf. His "God bless you, my darling child!" was the extent of
his piety as of his affection; and so he lived in the firm belief that
he had a heart overflowing with good and kind and generous sentiments.
The only unpleasant feelings he had arose for Nelly. Her eyes, that
in spite of all her efforts showed recent tears; her pale face; her
anxious, nervous manner worried and amazed him. "There 's something
strange about that girl," he would say to himself; "she would sing the
whole day long when we hadn't a shilling beyond the price of our dinner;
she was as merry as a lark, cutting out them images till two or three
o'clock of a morning; and now that we have lashings and leavings of
everything, with all manner of diversions about us, there she sits
moping and fretting the whole day." His ingenuity could detect no
explanation for this. "To be sure, she was lame, and it might grieve
her to look at dancing, in which she could take no part But when did she
ever show signs of an envious nature? She was growing old, too,----at
least, she was six or seven-and-twenty,--and no prospect of being
married; but was Nelly the girl to grieve over this? Were not all her
affections and all her hopes home-bound? 'T was n't fretting to be back
in Ireland that she could be!--she knew little of it before she left it."
And thus he was at the end of all his surmises without being nearer the
solution.

We have said enough to show that Nelly's sorrow was not causeless,
and that she had good reason to regret the days of even their hardest
fortune.

"Had we been but contented as we were!" cried she; "had we resisted
ambitions for which we were unfitted, and turned away from 'p