had stayed with
the sisters an unusually long time without exactly knowing why. Family
circumstances, she was told, had hitherto prevented her mother from
taking her to an English home. But now the current of her life was to be
changed. She was to leave Paris: she was, she believed, even to leave
France. Her mother had written that she was to go to London, and that
she (Lady Alice Brooke) would come for her, in company with Lesley's
grandfather, Lord Courtleroy, with whom she had been traveling abroad
for some time past.

Lesley was overjoyed by the news. She had lately come to suspect
something strange, something abnormal, in her own position. She had
remained at school when other girls went to their homes: she never had
been able to answer questions respecting her relations and their
belongings. Her mother, indeed, she knew; for she sometimes spent a
portion of the holidays with Lady Alice at a quiet watering-place in
France or Italy. And her mother was all that could be desired. Gentle,
refined, beautiful, with a slight shade of melancholy which only made
her delicate face more attractive--at least in Lesley's eyes--Lady Alice
Brooke gained love and admiration whithersoever she went. But she never
spoke of her husband. Lesley had gradually learned that she must not
mention his name. In her younger days she had been wont to ask questions
about her unknown father. Was he dead?--was he in another country?--why
had she never seen him? She soon found that these questions were gently
but decidedly checked. Her mother did not decline in so many words to
answer them, but she set them aside. Only once, when Lesley was fifteen,
and made some timid, wistful reference to the father whom she had never
known, did Lady Alice make her a formal answer.

"I will tell you all about your father when you are old enough to hear,"
she said. "Until then, Lesley, I had rather that you did not talk of
him."

Lesley shrank into herself abashed, and never mentioned his name again.

All the same, as she grew older, her fancy played about this unknown
father, as the fancy of young girls always plays about a mystery. Had he
committed some crime? Had he disgraced himself and his family that his
name might not be breathed in Lady Alice's ear? But she could not
believe that her good, beautiful mother would ever have loved and
married a wicked man!--such was the phrase that she, in her girlish
innocence and ignorance, used to herself. As to scand