"I am very sorry," I began, then I stopped
short.

"For what?" he asked, kindly.

I felt myself turning crimson, and William
Gibson, who was delicate as well as kind, put
no further questions. And, alas! my penitent
confession was not spoken. Many years later
he asked me what it was that I had meant to
say then, and when I told him, he shook his
head and sighed.

CHAPTER II.

THE death of my dear stepmother was the
first great calamity of my life, the first at least
of which I was conscious. It did not merely
pierce my very heart with grief, it was also the
leading cause of almost every subsequent
affliction which befel me. My father never
recovered the blow. He had been a happy and
prosperous man till then, but after his wife's
death he became both sad and unfortunate.
The judgment and industry which had won
him wealth and his knighthood failed him in
this great grief. He had heavy losses, speculated
to redeem, became the prey of designing
men, and died broken-hearted and ruined before
I was twenty. My brother William was left
wholly unprovided for; but from my mother I
derived a small income on which we could
live, and, thanks to my trustee and to William's
guardian and mine, Mr. Rolt, we were not
divided. We had to leave our old home,
however, and oh! how my heart ached as,
standing on the threshold of my dead
stepmother's room, I looked back on everything
which recalled her so vividly. Five years
had not effaced her from my heart, or made
her memory less dear; and when, leading
William by the hand, I passed by the little
fountain with its waters dancing in the sun,
I seemed to see her dear face looking tenderly
at her child and me through the shining
spray.

Mr. Rolt was married, and with his wife and
him we went to live, at Brompton. They were
very good-natured people, and both belonged
to what I will venture to call the sleeping
tribe. Few things roused them; yet I should
have been happy enough with them if my
darling's prospects had not given me many an
anxious thought.

Whenever I spoke to Mr. Rolt of my late
father's affairs, he raised his hands and turned
up his eyes to signify the deplorable state in
which they had been left. Whenever I
attempted to get hold of something like clear and
definite information, he put me away with a
"Oh, you girl! you girl!" that was both
sweeping and contemptuous.

But when I was twenty-one matters changed.
I then insisted on knowing how and why my
father's property had melted away; I insisted
on talking to the lawyer myself, and that gentleman
was heard to declare that "Miss Sydney
was an extraordinary young lady. Such a head
for business in a girl of her years was simply
fabulous." Good old gentleman, I don't think
my head was fabulous at all, nor were my
abilities so very wonderful. If my interest alone
had been at stake I dare say I should have let
matters take their course, nor troubled my brain
with the recovery of seemingly lost thousands.
But you see there was William! William, my
darling boy; William, my father's child, who
looked at me with his mother's eyes and smiled
that smile I had seen on her poor dear face the
night before she died. I had promised her
that I would be true to him, and feeling as I
did, that if I did not care for him, no one
would, I set my mind, my heart, my whole
energies to the task of saving something for
him out of our great wreck. Alas! I saved
very little, not enough to give him the
education of a gentleman. I had two hundred a-year
of my own; I resolved to spare out of that
whatever he might need, in order to live cheaply
and yet not be alone in a strange place.
William was to go to a German university. I
wrote to Mrs. Gibson and asked her for that
dreary Rosebower, which, as I knew, the poor
lady still found it very hard to let. Both Mr.
Rolt and the lawyer approved the course I was
taking. I could not do better for the boy, they
said.

"But you will find it lonely," remarked Mr.
Rolt, "very lonely."

"I shall not mind, Mr. Rolt; besides, who
knows but we may yet recover the forty
thousand pounds that West Indian Monsieur Thomas
owed my poor father?"

"Oh, you girl!" ejaculated Mr. Rolt.

"My dear young lady," coolly remarked the
lawyer, "you will get the forty thousand pounds
when Monsieur Thomas turns up—and he never
will turn up in this world. I have told you
again and again that according to my information
the man is dead."

"My dear sir, the man cheated my poor
father out of his money, but having heard of
my wonderful talents for business, and being
afraid of them, he pretends to be dead. Insects
do it constantly, why should not a thief do it
too?"

They laughed, and that was all the comfort I
got from them. It was very hard to part from
my dear boy, who was now eleven years old,
but I went through it bravely, I believe. I
know that women seldom make men, and I loved
him far too much to wish to keep him near me,
and ruin, maybe, the whole of his future life,
so we parted. I gave him up to the friend who
was to see him safe to Germany, and I went
alone to Rosebower.