seen nobody all your life but one
family; and I wish you had never seen them!'

'The Dallases? Oh, why, papa?'

'You do not care for them, I suppose, _now?_'

'I do not care for them at all, papa. I did care for one of them very
much, once; but I have given him up long ago. When I found he had
forgotten us, it was not worth while for me to remember. That is all
dead. His father and mother,--I doubt if ever they were real friends,
to you or to me, papa.'

'I am inclined to think William was not so much to blame. It was his
father's fault, perhaps.'

'It does not make much difference,' said Esther easily. 'If anything
could make him forsake us--after the old times--he is not worth
thinking about; and I do not think of him. That is an ended thing.'

There was a little something in the tone of the last words which
allowed the hearer to divine that the closing of that chapter had not
been without pain, and that the pain had perhaps scarcely died out. But
he did not pursue the subject, nor say any more about anything. He only
watched his daughter, uninterruptedly, though stealthily. Watched every
line of her figure; glanced at the sweet, fair face; followed every
quiet graceful movement. Esther was studying, and part of the time she
was drawing, absorbed in her work; yet throughout, what most struck her
father was the high happiness that sat on her whole person. It was in
the supreme calm of her brow; it was in a half-appearing smile, which
hardly broke, and yet informed the soft lips with a constant sweetness;
it seemed to the colonel to appear in her very positions and movements,
and probably it was true, for the lines of peace are not seen in an
uneasy figure, nor do the movements of grace come from a restless
spirit. The colonel's own brow should have unbent at the sweet sight,
but it did not. He drew his brows lower and lower over his watching
eyes, and now and then set his teeth, in a grim kind of way for which
there seemed no sort of provocation. 'The heart knoweth his own
bitterness;' no doubt Colonel Gainsborough's tasted its own particular
draught that night, which he shared with nobody.

CHAPTER XLVII.

_A TALK_.

The next day began for Esther quite in its wonted wise, and it will be
no harm to see how that was. She was up very early, a long while before
the sun; and after a somewhat careful dressing, for it was not in
Esther's nature to do anything imperfectly, she went down-stairs, to
her fat