; he was to attain legal manhood in a few months and was in Europe
for the first time. My last news of him had been from Paris and I was
expecting to hear further from one day to the other. His father was
dead, and though a selfish bachelor, little versed in the care of
children, I was considerably counted on by his mother to see that he
didn't smoke nor flirt too much, nor yet tumble off an Alp.

Mrs. Pallant immediately guessed that his mother was my sister
Charlotte, whom she spoke of familiarly, though I knew she had scarce
seen her. Then in a moment it came to her which of the Parkers Charlotte
had married; she remembered the family perfectly from the old New York
days--"that disgustingly rich set." She said it was very nice having the
boy come out that way to my care; to which I replied that it was very
nice for the boy. She pronounced the advantage rather mine--I ought to
have had children; there was something so parental about me and I would
have brought them up so well. She could make an allusion like that--to
all that might have been and had not been--without a gleam of guilt
in her eye; and I foresaw that before I left the place I should have
confided to her that though I detested her and was very glad we had
fallen out, yet our old relations had left me no heart for marrying
another woman. If I had remained so single and so sterile the fault was
nobody's but hers. She asked what I meant to do with my nephew--to which
I replied that it was much more a question of what he would do with
me. She wished to know if he were a nice young man and had brothers and
sisters and any particular profession. I assured her I had really seen
little of him; I believed him to be six feet high and of tolerable
parts. He was an only son, but there was a little sister at home, a
delicate, rather blighted child, demanding all the mother's care.

"So that makes your responsibility greater, as it were, about the boy,
doesn't it?" said Mrs. Pallant.

"Greater? I'm sure I don't know."

"Why if the girl's life's uncertain he may become, some moment, all the
mother has. So that being in your hands--"

"Oh I shall keep him alive, I suppose, if you mean that," I returned.

"Well, WE won't kill him, shall we, Linda?" my friend went on with a
laugh.

"I don't know--perhaps we shall!" smiled the girl.

II

I called on them the next at their lodgings, the modesty of which was
enhanced by a hundred pretty feminine devices--flowe