Five hundred dollars! and maybe she devoutly hopes I
shall be the good angel who will send it to her, but she is mistaken. Do
I look like an angel?" Miss Betsey said, fiercely, addressing herself
again to the cat. "No, they may go to destruction their own way. I wash
my hands of them. I should have been glad for the little girl, but I
can't have her. She will grow up like her mother, marry some fool, have
her friend and brother dangling after her, and smuggle dinners and
lunches for her children up in the attic. Well, so be it. That ends it
forever!"

The letter was an insult from beginning to end, and Miss McPherson felt
it as such, and with a sigh of keen regret as for something lost, she
put away the picture, and when Flora asked when little Miss Bessie was
coming, she answered curtly:

"Never!"

PART II.

CHAPTER I.

STONELEIGH.

The season is June; the time fourteen years prior to the commencement of
this story, and the place an old garden in Wales, about half way between
Bangor and the suspension bridge across Menai Straits. The garden, which
was very large, must have been beautiful, in the days when money was
more plenty with the proprietor than at present; but now there were
marks of neglect and decay everywhere, and in some parts of it the
shrubs, and vines, and roses were mixed together in so hopeless a tangle
that to separate them seemed impossible, while the yew trees, of which
there were several, grew dark, and thick, and untrimmed, and cast heavy
shadows upon the grass plats near them. The central part of the garden,
however, showed signs of care. The broad gravel walk was clean and
smooth, and the straight borders beside it were full of summer flowers,
among which roses were conspicuous. Indeed, there were roses everywhere,
for Anthony loved them as if they were his children, and so did the
white-faced invalid indoors, whose room old Dorothy, Anthony's wife,
kept filled with the freshest and choicest. It did not matter to her
that the sick man had wandered very far from the path of duty, and was
dying from excessive dissipation; he was her pride, her boy, whom she
had tended from his babyhood, and whom she would watch over and care for
to the last. She had defended and stood by him, when he brought home a
pretty little brown-eyed, brown haired creature, whose only fault was
her poverty and the fact that she was a chorus singer in the operas in
London, where Hugh McPherson had seen an