night, she sat long over
her fire, pondering, girl-fashion, on her talk with Horace
Graham. The tones of his voice were still ringing in her ears;
she seemed still to see his kind look, to feel the friendly
grasp of his hand; and as she thought of him, her familiar
little bed-room, with its white curtained bed, and pictured
walls, and well-filled bookshelves, seemed to vanish, and she
saw herself again, a desolate child, sitting at the window of
the Paris hotel that hot August night her father died, weeping
behind the convent grating, crouched on the damp earth in the
dark avenues of the Promenade a Sept Heures. He had not
changed in all these years, she thought; he had come back kind
and good as ever, to be her friend and protector, as he had
always been; and he had said she was not altered much either,
and yet she was--ah! so altered from the unconscious,
unthinking, ignorant child he had left. She began to pace up
and down the room, where indeed she had spent many a wakeful
night before now, thinking, reflecting, reasoning, trying to
make out the clue to her old life--striving to reconcile it
with the new life around her--not too successfully on the
whole. How was it she had first discovered the want of harmony
between them? How was it she had first learnt to appreciate
the gulf that separated the experiences of her first years,
from the pure, peaceful life she was leading now? She could
hardly have told; no one had revealed it to her, no one had
spoken of it; but in a thousand unconsidered ways--in talk, in
books, in the unconscious influences of her every-day
surroundings, she had come to understand the true meaning of
her father's life, and to know that the memory of these early
days, that she had found so bright and happy, was something
never to be spoken of, to be hidden away--a disgrace to her,
even, perhaps. Aunt Barbara never would let her talk of them,
would have blotted them out, if possible; she had wondered why
at first--she understood well enough now, and resented the
enforced silence. She only cherished the thought of them, and
of her father the more; she only clung to her old love for him
the more desperately, because it must be in secret; and she
longed at times, with a sad, inexpressible yearning, for
something of the old brightness that had died out one mournful
night nearly eight years ago, when she had talked with her
father for the last time.

"I think I must be a hundred years old," the gi