suppose I'm the sort of man to _be_ helped; and yet I
can't help fancying there's a--Past--a Past behind me--a life in which I
once was proud of my independence. But it strikes me that this was very
long ago."

He drew the bedclothes over his head again, and made no further reply.
Lady Alice came to see him after this conversation as often as the rules
of the hospital would allow her; and, although she seemed to get little
response from him, the fact really remained that she was establishing an
ascendancy over the man such as no nurse or doctor in the place had yet
maintained. Others noticed it beside herself; but she, disheartened a
little by her disappointment in some of the other patients, did not
recognize the reality of his attachment to her. And an event occurred
about the time which put John Smith and hospital matters out of her head
for a considerable time to come.

Old Lord Courtleroy died suddenly. He was an old man, but so hale and
hearty that his death had not been expected in the least; but he was
found dead in his bed one morning, and the doctors pronounced that his
complaint had been heart disease. The heir to the title and estate was a
distant cousin whom Lady Alice and her father had never liked; and when
he entered upon his possessions, Lady Alice knew that the time had come
for her to seek a home elsewhere. She had sufficient to live upon;
indeed, for a single woman, she was almost rich; but the loneliness of
her position once more forced itself upon her, especially as Lesley was
not by her side to cheer her gradually darkening life.

She wrote the main facts concerning Lord Courtleroy's death and the
change in her circumstances in short, rather disjointed letters to
Lesley, and received very tender replies; but even then she felt a vague
dissatisfaction with the girl's letters. They were full of a wistfulness
which she could not understand: she felt that something remote had crept
into them, some aloofness for which she could not account. And as
Captain Harry Duchesne happened to come across her one day, and inquired
very particularly after Miss Brooke, she induced him to promise to call
on Lesley when he was in London, and to report to her all that Lesley
did or said. If it was a somewhat underhand proceeding, she told herself
that she was justified by her anxiety as a mother.

Lord Courtleroy had left a considerable sum to Lesley, and when mother
and daughter were reunited, as Lady Alice hoped