echingly.

"Pray, now, is he really dead? He, my father!--he, too, was lost like
you. Can't he come back again as you have done?"

"Do you grieve for him still, then? Poor girl!" said the stranger,
evasively, and seating himself. Fanny continued to listen for an answer
to her touching question; but finding that none was given, she stole
away to a corner of the room, and leaned her face on her hands, and
seemed to think--till at last, as she so sat, the tears began to flow
down her cheeks, and she wept, but silently and unnoticed.

"But, sir," said the guest, after a short pause, "how is this? Fanny
tells me she supports you by her work. Are you so poor, then? Yet I left
you your son's bequest; and you, too, I understood, though not rich,
were not in want!"

"There was a curse on my gold," said the old man, sternly. "It was
stolen from us."

There was another pause. Simon broke it.

"And you, young man--how has it fared with you? You have prospered, I
hope."

"I am as I have been for years--alone in the world, without kindred and
without friends. But, thanks to Heaven, I am not a beggar!"

"No kindred and no friends!" repeated the old man. "No father--no
brother--no wife--no sister!"

"None! No one to care whether I live or die," answered the stranger,
with a mixture of pride and sadness in his voice. "But, as the song has
it--

"'I care for nobody--no, not I,
For nobody cares for me!'"

There was a certain pathos in the mockery with which he repeated
the homely lines, although, as he did, he gathered himself up, as if
conscious of a certain consolation and reliance on the resources not
dependent on others which he had found in his own strong limbs and his
own stout heart.

At that moment he felt a soft touch upon his hand, and he saw Fanny
looking at him through the tears that still flowed.

"You have no one to care for you? Don't say so! Come and live with us,
brother; we'll care for you. I have never forgotten the flowers--never!
Do come! Fanny shall love you. Fanny can work for three!"

"And they call her an idiot!" mumbled the old man, with a vacant smile
on his lips.

"My sister! You shall be my sister! Forlorn one--whom even Nature has
fooled and betrayed! Sister!--we, both orphans! Sister!" exclaimed that
dark, stern man, passionately, and with a broken voice; and he opened
his arms, and Fanny, without a blush or a thought of shame, threw
herself on his breast. He kissed h