If we forgive all things to old age, so much the more surely do we forgive all injuries to the fading enemy. That she had suffered much cruelty and neglect at the hands of her father, was a fact that Diana could not forget, any more than she could forget the name which he had given her. It was a part of her life not to be put off or done away with. But in these last days, with all her heart she forgave and pitied him. She pitied him for the crooked paths into which his feet had wandered at the very outset of life, and from which so weak a soul could find no issue. She pitied him for that moral blindness which had kept him pleasantly unconscious of the supreme depth of his degradation--a social Laplander, who never having seen a western summer, had no knowledge that his own land was dark and benighted. Happily for Diana and her generous lover, the Captain was not a difficult penitent. He was indeed a man who, having lost the capacity and the need for sin, took very kindly to penitence, as a species of sentimental luxury. "Yes, my dear," he said complacently--for even in the hour of his penitence he insisted on regarding himself as a social martyr--"my life has been a very hard one. Fortune has not been kind to me. In the words of the immortal bard, my lines have _not_ been set in pleasant places. I should have been glad if Providence had allowed me to be a better father to you, a better husband to your poor mother--a better Christian, in fact--and had spared me the repeated humiliation of going through the Insolvent Debtors' Court. It is not always easy to understand the justice of these things: and it has often appeared to me that something of the favouritism which is the bane of our governments on earth must needs obtain at a higher tribunal. One man enters life with an entailed estate worth seventy thousand a-year, while another finds himself in the hands of the Jews before he is twenty years of age. 'There's something in this world amiss shall be unriddled by-and-by,' as the poet observes. The circumstances of my own existence I have ever regarded as dark and enigmatic. And, indeed, the events of this life are altogether inexplicable, my love. There is that fellow Sheldon, now, who began life as a country dentist, a man without family or connections, who--well, I will not repine. If I am spared to behold my daughter mistress of a fine estate, although in a foreign country, I can depart in peace. But you must have a house in town, my dear. Yes, London must be your head-quarters. You must not be buried alive in Normandy. There is no place like London. Take the word of a man who has seen the finest Continental cities, and lived in them--that is the point, my love--lived in them. For a fine afternoon in the beginning of May, an apartment in the Champs Elysees, or the Boulevard, is an earthly paradise; but the Champs Elysees in a wet December--the Boulevard in a sweltering August! London is the only spot upon earth that is never intolerable.