At last, however, just after I had passed my eighteenth birthday, and was a tall, shabbily-dressed girl, who had learnt all that could be taught at the High School—the only one to which Aunt Penelope could afford to send me—she herself came to me in a state of great excitement, and said that father was returning home.

"He is coming to settle in England," she said. "I must be frank with you, Heather, and tell you that it is not at all to your advantage that he should do so."

"Aunt Penelope," I answered, "why do you say words of that sort?"

"I say them," she replied, "because I know the world and you don't. Your father is not the sort of man who would do any girl the slightest good."

"You had better not speak against him to me," I said.

"I have taken great pains with you," said Aunt Penelope, "and have brought you up entirely out of my own very slender means. You are, for your age, fairly well educated, you understand household duties. You can light a fire as quickly and deftly as any girl I ever met, and you understand the proper method of dusting a room. You can also do plain cooking, and you can make your own clothes. I don't know anything about your intellectual acquirements, but your teacher, Miss Mansel, at the High School, says that you are fairly proficient. Well, my dear, all these things you owe to me. You came to me a very ignorant, very self-opinionated, silly, delicate little girl. You are now a fine, strong young woman. Your father is returning—he will be here to-morrow."

I clasped my hands tightly together. There was no use in saying to this withered old aunt of mine how I pined for him, how his kindly, good-humoured face, his blue eyes, his grizzled locks, had haunted and haunted me for ten long years.

"I understand," said Aunt Penelope, "that your father, after running through all his own money, and all of yours—for your mother had as much to live on as I have—has suddenly come into a new fortune. In his last letter to me he wrote that he wished to take you to London to introduce you to the great world. Now, I earnestly hope, my dear Heather, that you will be firm on this point and refuse to go with him. I am an old woman now, and I need your presence as a return for all the kindness I have done for you, and the life with your father would be anything but good for you. I shall naturally not object to your seeing him again, but, to speak frankly, I think, after all the years of toil and 

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