by the merest accident that I became, in any way, mixed
up in his affairs."

"Then you are probably unaware of the character he bore,"
Therese Linders said, suddenly exchanging her air of cold
constraint for a voice and manner expressive of the bitterest
scorn; "he was a gambler by profession, a man of the most
reckless and dissipated life; he plunged by choice into the
lowest society he could find; he broke his mother's heart
before he was one-and-twenty; he neglected, and all but
deserted his wife; he ruined the lives of all who came in his
way--he was a man without principle or feeling, without
affection for any living being."

"Pardon me, Madame," Graham said again, "he was devotedly
attached to his little daughter, and--and he is dead; to the
dead much may surely be forgiven," for indeed at that moment
his sympathies were rather with the man by whose death-bed he
had watched than with the bitter woman before him.

"There is no question of forgiveness here," says Madame the
Superior, with a slight change of manner; "I bear my brother
no malice; it was not I that he injured, though he would
doubtless have done so had it been in his power. In separating
myself from him, I felt that I was only doing my duty; but I
have kept myself informed as to his career, and had I seen
many change or hope of amendment, I might have made some steps
towards reconciliation."

"And that step, Madame," Graham ventured to say, "was taken by
your brother on his death-bed----"

"Are you alluding to this letter, Monsieur?" she inquired,
crushing it in her hand as she spoke, "you have forgotten its
contents strangely, if you imagine that I consider that as a
step towards reconciliation. My brother expresses no wish of
the kind; he was no hypocrite at least, and he says with
sufficient plainness, that he only turns to me as a last
resource."

And, in fact, the letter was, as we know, couched in no very
pleasant or conciliatory terms, and Graham was silenced for
the moment. At last, ----

"He appeals to your mother's memory on behalf of his child,"
he said.

"He does well to allude to our mother!" cried the Superior.
"Yes, I recognise him here. He does well to speak of her, when
he knows that he broke her heart. She adored him, Monsieur. He
was her one thought in life, when there were others who--who
perhaps--but all that signifies little now. But in appealing to
my mother's memory he suggests the strongest reason why, even
now