that if he did not keep his promise she would carry his
letters into every court in the kingdom--letters in which his love was
pledged to her ten thousand times; and, after exposing him to the world
as the perjurer and traitor he was, she would kill herself.

Frank had one more interview with Helen, whose mother was dead then, and
who was living companion with old Lady Pontypool,--one more interview,
where it was resolved that he was to do his duty; that is, to redeem his
vow; that is, to pay a debt cozened from him by a sharper; that is, to
make two honest people miserable. So the two judged their duty to be,
and they parted.

The living fell in only too soon; but yet Frank Bell was quite a grey
and worn-out man when he was inducted into it. Helen wrote him a letter
on his marriage, beginning "My dear Cousin," and ending "always truly
yours." She sent him back the other letters, and the lock of his
hair--all but a small piece. She had it in her desk when she was talking
to the Major.

Bell lived for three or four years in his living, at the end of which
time, the Chaplainship of Coventry Island falling vacant, Frank applied
for it privately, and having procured it, announced the appointment to
his wife. She objected, as she did to everything. He told her bitterly
that he did not want her to come: so she went. Bell went out in Governor
Crawley's time, and was very intimate with that gentleman in his later
years. And it was in Coventry Island, years after his own marriage, and
five years after he had heard of the birth of Helen's boy, that his own
daughter was born.

She was not the daughter of the first Mrs. Bell, who died of island
fever very soon after Helen Pendennis and her husband, to whom Helen had
told everything, wrote to inform Bell of the birth of their child. "I
was old, was I?" said Mrs. Bell the first; "I was old, and her inferior,
was I? but I married you, Mr. Bell, and kept you from marrying her?" and
hereupon she died. Bell married a colonial lady, whom he loved fondly.
But he was not doomed to prosper in love; and, this lady dying in
childbirth, Bell gave up too: sending his little girl home to Helen
Pendennis and her husband, with a parting prayer that they would
befriend her.

The little thing came to Fairoaks from Bristol, which is not very far
off, dressed in black, and in company of a soldier's wife, her nurse,
at parting from whom she wept bitterly. But she soon dried up her grief
under Hel