ock set aside for her
father's grave.

"Don't you think," she once whispered to Vaudemont, "that God attends to
us more if we are good to those who are sick and hungry?"

"Certainly we are taught to think so."

"Well, I'll tell you a secret--don't tell again. Grandpapa once said
that my father had done bad things; now, if Fanny is good to those she
can help, I think that God will hear her more kindly when she prays him
to forgive what her father did. Do you think so too? Do say--you are so
wise!"

"Fanny, you are wiser than all of us; and I feel myself better and
happier when I hear you speak."

There were, indeed, many moments when Vaudemont thought that her
deficiencies of intellect might have been repaired, long since, by
skilful culture and habitual companionship with those of her own age;
from which companionship, however, Fanny, even when at school, had
shrunk aloof. At other moments there was something so absent and
distracted about her, or so fantastic and incoherent, that Vaudemont,
with the man's hard, worldly eye, read in it nothing but melancholy
confusion. Nevertheless, if the skein of ideas was entangled, each
thread in itself was a thread of gold.

Fanny's great object--her great ambition--her one hope--was a tomb for
her supposed father. Whether from some of that early religion attached
to the grave, which is most felt in Catholic countries, and which she
had imbibed at the convent; or from her residence so near the burial
ground, and the affection with which she regarded the spot;--whatever
the cause, she had cherished for some years, as young maidens usually
cherish the desire of the Altar--the dream of the Gravestone. But
the hoard was amassed so slowly;--now old Gawtrey was attacked by
illness;--now there was some little difficulty in the rent; now some
fluctuation in the price of work; and now, and more often than all, some
demand on her charity, which interfered with, and drew from, the pious
savings. This was a sentiment in which her new friend sympathised
deeply; for he, too, remembered that his first gold had bought that
humble stone which still preserved upon the earth the memory of his
mother.

Meanwhile, days crept on, and no new violence was offered to Fanny.
Vaudemont learned, then, by little and little--and Fanny's account was
very confused--the nature of the danger she had run.

It seemed that one day, tempted by the fineness of the weather up
the road that led from the suburb