you, I know your father's name; but just now I
am forbidden by your mother to disclose it, even to you. Come to your
room."

He raised her from the chair, and as she stood before him, it was
pitiable to witness the agonized entreaty in her pallid but beautiful
face.

"Please tell me only one thing, and I can bear all else patiently.
Was he--was my father--a gentleman? Oh! my mother could never have
loved any--but a gentleman."

"His treatment of her and of you would scarcely entitle him to that
honourable epithet; yet in the eyes of the world your father
assuredly is in every respect a gentleman, is considered even an
aristocrat."

She sobbed aloud, and the violence of her emotion, which she seemed
unable to control, alarmed him. Leading her to the library door he
said, retaining her hand.

"Compose yourself, or you will be really sick. Now that your poor
tortured heart is easy, can you not go to sleep?"

"Oh, thank you! Yes, I will try."

"Lily, next time trust me. Trust your guardian in everything.
Good-night. God bless you."

CHAPTER XXV.

"'The dice of the gods are always loaded,' and what appears the
merest chance is as inexorably fixed, predetermined, as the rules of
mathematics, or the laws of crystallization. What madness to flout
fate!"

Mrs. Orme laid down her pen as she spoke, and leaned back in her
chair.

"Did you speak to me?" inquired Mrs. Waul, who had been nodding over
her worsted work, and was aroused by the sound of the voice.

"No, I was merely thinking aloud; a foolish habit I have contracted
since I began to aspire to literary laurels. Go to sleep again, and
finish your dream."

Upon the writing desk lay a _MS_. in morocco cover, and secured by
heavy bronze clasps, into which the owner put a small key attached to
her watch chain, carefully locking and laying it away in a drawer of
the desk.

Approaching a table in the corner of the room, Mrs. Orme filled
a tall narrow Venetian glass with that violet-flavoured,
violet-perfumed Capri wine, whose golden bubbles danced upon the
brim, and, having drained the last amber drop, she rolled her chair
close to the window, looped back the curtains, and sat down.

The lodgings she had occupied since her arrival in Naples were
situated on the _Riviera di Chiaja_, near the _Villa Reale_, and not
far from the divergence into the _Strada Mergellina_. Of the
wonderful beauty of the scene beyond her front windows She had never
wearied