Mr Waring did not make any reply, but shrank a little aside, to let her pass. He looked like a man who was afraid. She had spared him; she had not betrayed the ignorance in which he had brought her up; but now the moment of reckoning was near, and he was afraid of Frances. He went back into the _salone_, and walked up and down with a restlessness which was natural enough, considering how all the embers of his life had been raked up by this unexpected event. He had lived in absolute quiet for fourteen long years: a strange life--a life which might have been supposed to be impossible for a man still in the heyday of his strength; but yet, as it appeared, a life which suited him, which he preferred to others more natural. To settle down in an Italian village with a little girl of six for his sole companion--when he came to think of it, nothing could be more unnatural, more extraordinary; and yet he had liked it well enough, as well as he could have liked anything at that crisis of his fate. He was the kind of man who, in other circumstances, in another age, would have made himself a monk, and spent his existence very placidly in illuminating manuscripts. He had done something as near this as is possible to an Englishman not a Roman Catholic, of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, Waring had no ecclesiastical tendencies, or even in the nineteenth century he might have found out for himself some pseudo-monkery in which he could have been happy. As it was, he had retired with his little girl, and on the whole had been comfortable enough. But now the little girl had grown up, and required to have various things accounted for; and the other individuals who had claims upon him, whom he thought he had shaken off altogether, had turned up again, and had to be dealt with. The monk had an easy time of it in comparison. He who has but himself to think of may manage himself, if he has good luck; but the responsibility of others on your shoulders is a terrible drawback to tranquillity. A little girl! That seemed the simplest of all things. It had never occurred to him that she would form a link by which all his former burdens might be drawn back; or that she, more wonderful still, should ever arise and demand to know why. But both of these impossible things had happened.