dy making yellow patches of sickly light amidst the afternoon fog.

The Captain twitched his silk handkerchief off his face with an
impatient gesture as Diana entered the room.

"Now, then, what is it?" he asked peevishly, without looking at the
intruder.

He recognised her in the next moment; but that first impatient
salutation was about as warm a welcome as any which Miss Paget received
from her father. In sad and bitter truth, he did not care for her. His
marriage with Mary Anne Kepp had been the one grateful impulse of his
life; and even the sentiment which had prompted that marriage had been
by no means free from the taint of selfishness. But he had been quite
unprepared to find that this grand sacrifice of his life should involve
another sacrifice in the maintenance of a daughter he did not want; and
he was very much inclined to quarrel with the destiny that had given
him this burden.

"If you had been a boy, I might have made you useful to me sooner or
later," the Captain said to his daughter when he found himself alone
with her late on the night of her return; "but what on earth am I to do
with a daughter, in the unsettled life I lead? However, since that old
harridan has sent you back, you must manage in the best way you can,"
concluded Captain Paget with a discontented sigh.

From this time Diana Paget had inhabited the nest of the vultures, and
every day had brought its new lesson of trickery and falsehood. There
are men--and bad men too--who would have tried to keep the secret of
their shifts and meannesses hidden from an only child; but Horatio
Paget believed himself the victim of man's ingratitude, and his
misdoings the necessity of an evil destiny. It is not easy for the
unsophisticated intellect to gauge those moral depths to which the man
who lives by his wits must sink before his career is finished, or to
understand how, with every step in the swindler's downward road, the
conscience grows tougher, the perception of shame blunter, the savage
selfishness of the animal nature stronger. Diana Paget had discovered
some of her father's weaknesses during her miserable childhood; and in
the days of her unpaid-for schooling she had known that his most solemn
promises were no more to be relied on than the capricious breath of a
summer breeze. So the revelations which awaited her under the paternal
roof were not utterly strange or entirely unexpected. Day by day she
grew more accustomed to that atmosphere o