he was very distinguished looking. The
slender fairness of youth was all outgrown. Compact, firm, supple, with
about the right proportion of flesh, bronzed, with hair and beard
darker than of yore, and that decisive aspect a man comes to have who
learns by experience to rely upon his own judgment.

"I am on my way thither," he announced, in a crisp, business-like
manner. "It is high time I returned home, though a man with no ties
could spend his life amid the curiosities of the ancient civilizations.
But my mother needs me, and I have a little girl in England."

"Ah?" with a faint lifting of the brows that indicated curiosity.

"I was married in India, but my wife died in England, where our child
was born," he said briefly, not much given to mysteries. "An aunt has
been keeping her. She must be about five," he adds more slowly.

Madame Lepelletier wondered a little about the marriage. Had the grief
at his wife's death plunged him into African wilds?

They spent two or three days in London, and she decided to wait for the
next steamer and go over with him, as he frankly admitted that he knew
nothing about children, except as he had seen them run wild. So he
despatched a letter home, recounting the chance meeting and announcing
their return, little dreaming of the suspicions it might create.

Floyd Grandon found a lovely fairy awaiting him in the old Devonshire
rectory. Tall for her age, exquisitely trained, possessing something
better than her mother's infantile prettiness. Eyes of so dark a gray
that in some lights they were black, and hair of a soft ripe-wheat
tint, fine and abundant. But the soul and spirit in her face drew him
toward her more than the personal loveliness. She was extremely shy at
first, though she had been taught to expect papa, but the strangeness
wore off presently.

They were very loth to give her up, and Mrs. Garth exacted a promise
that in her girlhood she might have her again. But when they were
fairly started on their journey Cecil was for a while inconsolable.
Grandon was puzzled. She seemed such a strange, sudden gift that he
knew not what to do. At Liverpool they met Madame Lepelletier, but all
her tenderness was of no avail. Cecil did not cry now, but utterly
refused to be comforted by this stranger.

It was to her father that she turned at last. That night she crept into
his arms of her own accord, and sobbed softly on his shoulder.

"Can I never have Auntie Dora again?" she aske