"I wish you would let me manage all these things for you," insisted Miss Nelly, with great solemnity; "I'm sure you're cheated, papa, and you're far too generous and open-hearted. Besides, you hate accounts, and I _know_ you pay them often without adding them up. How I like figures! I like managing--I like looking into things--I like having plenty to do." "You'll have a house of your own to manage some day," answered her father gaily, "and a husband too, you little witch. I'm sure I don't envy him!" But his face fell while he spoke; for he was thinking, when the fatal time came, what should he do without his darling, the light, and joy, and comfort of his home? Miss Helen blushed. Perhaps she too had not been without her maiden dreams of some such contingency hereafter. Perhaps she had foreshadowed to herself the semblance of a future lord, whom she would tend as fondly and love even more devotedly than papa. Perhaps already that phantom shape had been filled in and coloured, and appeared visibly in the flesh. "Halloo, young woman!" exclaimed Sir Henry, tossing another letter across the table, "here's something for you! An enormous envelope, stamped with the arms of the Household Cavalry. Bravo, Nell! Have they offered you a cornetcy, or a situation as bandmaster, or what?" The blush deepened on Helen's face till it spread to the roots of her thick dark hair; but she put back the unopened letter in her father's hand, and, stealing round his chair, leaned on his shoulder, while she stood behind him. "Read it, papa," said she; "nobody in the world can have anything to say to me that ought not to come to you first." Again that pang of remorse shot through him, as he remembered his own unworthiness. "What a good girl I have got!" he thought; "and what a poor, irresolute wretch I am! I cannot trust myself for a day! I ought to be better; I wish I could try to be better! Here have I been, ready to gamble away my child's position and her every-day comfort for the sake of a pair of black eyes and lanthorn jaws that I had never seen a month ago, that I don't care for half as I do for Nell!--that don't care a brass farthing for _me_! And I'd do it again, I _know_, under temptation--that's the worst of it! Ah! I wish I had led a different life, for Nelly's sake. I wonder if it's too late to begin now?"