afraid I spoke flippantly. I said: "Oh, father, another lady fascinated
by the popular preacher?"

The garden chairs were near us. He signed to me gravely to be seated by
his side, and said to himself: "This is my fault."

"What is your fault?" I asked.

"I have left you in ignorance, my dear, of my cousin's sad story. It
is soon told; and, if it checks your merriment, it will make amends by
deserving your sympathy. I was indebted to her father, when I was a boy,
for acts of kindness which I can never forget. He was twice married. The
death of his first wife left him with one child--once my playfellow; now
the lady whose visit has excited your curiosity. His second wife was a
Belgian. She persuaded him to sell his business in London, and to invest
the money in a partnership with a brother of hers, established as a
sugar-refiner at Antwerp. The little daughter accompanied her father to
Belgium. Are you attending to me, Helena?"

I was waiting for the interesting part of the story, and was wondering
when he would get to it.

"As time went on," he resumed, "the new partner found that the value
of the business at Antwerp had been greatly overrated. After a long
struggle with adverse circumstances, he decided on withdrawing from
the partnership before the whole of his capital was lost in a failing
commercial speculation. The end of it was that he retired, with his
daughter, to a small town in East Flanders; the wreck of his property
having left him with an income of no more than two hundred pounds a
year."

I showed my father that I was attending to him now, by inquiring what
had become of the Belgian wife. Those nervous quiverings, which Eunice
has mentioned in her diary, began to appear in his face.

"It is too shameful a story," he said, "to be told to a young girl. The
marriage was dissolved by law; and the wife was the person to blame. I
am sure, Helena, you don't wish to hear any more of _this_ part of the
story."

I did wish. But I saw that he expected me to say No--so I said it.

"The father and daughter," he went on, "never so much as thought of
returning to their own country. They were too poor to live comfortably
in England. In Belgium their income was sufficient for their wants. On
the father's death, the daughter remained in the town. She had friends
there, and friends nowhere else; and she might have lived abroad to the
end of her days, but for a calamity to which we are all liable. A
long and seri