ain till
dinner; but to-day the niece, instead of quitting the room, went to the
window-seat, and sat down there. Mr. Helstone looked round uneasily once
or twice, as if he wished her away; but she was gazing from the window,
and did not seem to mind him: so he continued the perusal of his morning
paper--a particularly interesting one it chanced to be, as new movements
had just taken place in the Peninsula, and certain columns of the
journal were rich in long dispatches from General Lord Wellington. He
little knew, meantime, what thoughts were busy in his niece's
mind--thoughts the conversation of the past half-hour had revived but
not generated; tumultuous were they now, as disturbed bees in a hive,
but it was years since they had first made their cells in her brain.

She was reviewing his character, his disposition, repeating his
sentiments on marriage. Many a time had she reviewed them before, and
sounded the gulf between her own mind and his; and then, on the other
side of the wide and deep chasm, she had seen, and she now saw, another
figure standing beside her uncle's--a strange shape, dim, sinister,
scarcely earthly--the half-remembered image of her own father, James
Helstone, Matthewson Helstone's brother.

Rumours had reached her ear of what that father's character was; old
servants had dropped hints; she knew, too, that he was not a good man,
and that he was never kind to her. She recollected--a dark recollection
it was--some weeks that she had spent with him in a great town
somewhere, when she had had no maid to dress her or take care of her;
when she had been shut up, day and night, in a high garret-room, without
a carpet, with a bare uncurtained bed, and scarcely any other furniture;
when he went out early every morning, and often forgot to return and
give her her dinner during the day, and at night, when he came back, was
like a madman, furious, terrible, or--still more painful--like an idiot,
imbecile, senseless. She knew she had fallen ill in this place, and that
one night, when she was very sick he had come raving into the room, and
said he would kill her, for she was a burden to him. Her screams had
brought aid; and from the moment she was then rescued from him she had
never seen him, except as a dead man in his coffin.

That was her father. Also she had a mother, though Mr. Helstone never
spoke to her of that mother, though she could not remember having seen
her; but that she was alive she knew. Thi