were as successful as the first, there was every likelihood of his
becoming a rich man. He had got his head fairly above water, and meant
to keep it there; he conceived that he had brooded too long over the
past.

He had seen little Dick Vane when he first arrived, and he had spent
nearly two hours with Florence; but he had not yet encountered the
General or the General's niece and adopted daughter, Enid Vane. The two
had gone out riding, and did not return until after five o'clock.

"Just in time for tea!" said the General, in a tone of profound
satisfaction. "I thought that we were later. And how do you find
yourself, Hubert, my dear boy? Why, I declare I shouldn't have known
you! Should you, Enid? He is as brown as a Hindoo."

"Would you have known me?" said Hubert, with a smile at the girl who had
followed her uncle into the room, and now gave him her hand by way of
greeting. The smile was forced in order to conceal a momentary twitch of
his features, which he could not quite control at the first sight of
Sydney Vane's daughter; but it looked natural enough.

The girl raised her eyes to his face with a shy sweet smile.

"I am afraid that I don't remember very well," she said; and Hubert
thought that he had never seen anything much prettier than her smile.

She was seventeen, and looked so fair, so delicate, in her almost
childish loveliness of outline and expression, that Florence's white
skin became haggard and hard in comparison. Her slight figure was
displayed to full advantage by a well-made riding-habit, and under her
correct little high hat her golden hair shone like sunshine. There was a
soft color in her cheeks, a freshness on her smiling lips, that made the
observer long to kiss them, as if they belonged to some simple child.
Her manner too was almost that of a child--frank, naive, direct, and
unembarrassed; but in her eyes there lurked a shadow which contradicted
the innocent simplicity of her expressive countenance. If was not a
shadow of evil, but of sadness, of a subdued melancholy--the sadness of
a girl whose life had been darkened in early life by some undeserved
calamity. It was a look that redeemed her face from the charge of
inanimateness that might otherwise have been brought against it, and
gave it that faintly sombre touch which was especially fascinating to a
man like Hubert Lepel.

He continued to talk to the General, who had questions to ask him
concerning his travels and his friends