very hard to spoil the
work which I am doing."

Una sprang to her feet.

"Father! How dare they?" she said indignantly. "Horrid people, . . .
I hate them!"

Her father reached out his hand and drew her to him.

"But as long as they cannot find out exactly what I _am_ doing," he
said, "or how I am doing it, they cannot really spoil my work; and that
is why I have never made friends with people in any of the different
places where we have stayed, in case the people who want to spoil my
work should try and find out through these new friends who I am, and
what I am doing. And that is why I want you, my little Una, to help me
to keep my work as secret as possible."

"Oh, father, I will, I will!" cried Una. "Only--only I don't quite see
how I can let out a secret if I don't exactly know what it is."

"I cannot tell you all the secret, little Una," said her father--"at
least not until you are older and can understand more about it. But if
I were to let you make friends and go about wherever you like people
would begin to wonder where you came from, and who you were, and to ask
you questions about me and what I did; and although not really knowing
my secret, you might let out little bits of it, until people began to
wonder and talk about you and me. One can never be too careful," he
added, half to himself.

"Yes, I understand, father," said Una gravely; and she sat at her
father's feet, looking into the fire and not talking much, until the
little clock on the mantelpiece struck seven, and Marie came to tell
her that it was bedtime.

"I wonder whether I was wise in telling her so much," Monsieur Gen
thought to himself, when his little daughter had gone. "But it seemed
the only thing to be done, and she is prudent beyond her years, poor
little, lonely girl. I do not think she will chatter about anything I
have told her."

For some time after this Una was rather quiet and sad, more like what
she had been when Norah and Dan first got to know her, and not nearly
so ready to laugh and play as she had been of late.

The secret her father had told her weighed heavily on the little girl's
mind--she was so afraid that she might have let out to her little
friends, though unknowingly, something about her father's work, and she
was careful now not to say anything which might lead them to ask
questions about him.

One afternoon she was walking by herself in the wood, when she came
across Tom seated on the ground with