but triumph.
It was sad to see him so depressed, so broken-spirited, so hopeless. For
he had been meant for better things. But his will was weak, his
principles had never been settled, and with his first lapse from honesty
all self-respect seemed to leave him. Thenceforth he went down hill, and
would long ago have reached the bottom but for the one helping hand that
had been held out to stay him in his mad career. That hand belonged to
none of his kith and kin, however. It was seamed and roughened and
reddened by honest toil; but the toil had at least been honest and the
toiler's love for the fine gentleman for whom she worked was loving and
sincere. To cut a long story short, Francis Trent had married a
dressmaker of the lower grade, and a dressmaker, moreover, who had once
been a ladies'-maid.

While he slouched away to his poverty-stricken home, and Oliver solaced
himself with a novel and a cigar, and Miss Ethel Kenyon sank to sleep
in spite of a tumult of innocent delight which would have kept a person
of less healthy mind and body wide awake for hours, Lesley Brooke, who
was to influence the fate of all these three, lay upon her bed bemoaning
her loneliness of heart, and saying to herself that she should never be
happy in her father's house. It was not that she had met with any
positive unkindness: she could accuse nobody of wishing to be rude or
cold, but the atmosphere was not one to which she was accustomed, and it
gave her considerable discomfort. Even the Mrs. Romaine of whom her
father spoke as if she would be a friend, was not very congenial to her.
Rosalind's eyes remained cold, despite their softness, and Lesley was
vaguely conscious of a repulsion--such as we sometimes feel on touching
a toad or a snake--when Mrs. Romaine put her hand on the girl's listless
fingers. No, what it was Lesley could not tell, but she was sure of
this, that she could never like Mrs. Romaine.

And she cried herself to sleep, and dreamed of the convent and the sunny
skies of France.

CHAPTER X.

KNIGHT-ERRANTRY.

Lesley found that she had unintentionally given great offence to Sarah,
who was a supreme authority in her father's house, and possibly to her
aunt as well, by the arrangement with her father that she would have a
maid of her own. In vain she protested that she did not need one, and
had not really asked for one; the impression remained upon Miss Brooke's
mind and Sarah's mind that she had in some way compla