Thus, through her, he enjoyed life anew. Now his time was divided like the Arctic year—into long darkness and long light. The time spent in his gloomy “penitentiary” on the promontory, was his Arctic night; the time passed in wandering and sight-seeing with his brilliant and ardent little traveling companion, was his Arctic day. David Lindsay, chilled by the cold “remembrances,” that grew cold only in the refrigerator of Marcel’s translations, gradually ceased to inquire after Miss de la Vera, or send his “respects” to her. And so the great gulf between the young souls seemed impassable, until one desperate leap in the dark cleared it. Meanwhile the years rolled rapidly onward; his child was growing up, and he himself was growing—middle-aged. The last time he took her out to spend her midsummer vacation in traveling with him through a succession of beautiful summer resorts, he was thirty-five years old, with perhaps a dozen silver threads scattered over his fine head, but glistening with terrible conspicuousness amid the jetty blackness of his hair. She was just fifteen, tall and well-developed for her years, a radiant blonde, with a delicate Grecian profile, fair, clear transparent complexion, large, soft, dark blue eyes, veiled by dark eyelashes, and arched by dark eyebrows, and with an aureole of lightly flowing, pale, golden-hued hair. Marcel had not seen her since the preceding Christmas holidays, a period of nearly seven months, during which she had bloomed from the bud to the half-opened rose of womanhood. He looked at her with surprised and delighted admiration. He said nothing on the subject, expressed no opinion, paid no compliment—only he refused more emphatically than ever his mother’s invitation to bring his niece and join her party at Cacouna, Canada; and he resolved, more firmly than ever, to keep his lovely ward to himself. Indeed, little Gloria desired nothing better. She loved her young uncle with all the devotion of a grateful, loyal, fervent heart, and was perfectly satisfied with his companionship, and only his, in all their summer wanderings and sojournings. She had no one else to love, poor child; her Aunt Agrippina she had only feared; and her childhood’s playmate, David Lindsay, she only remembered tenderly, like one lost long ago, or like the dead. Marcel was all in all to her. On this last occasion of which I speak, when Colonel de Crespigney, first seeing his young ward after a seven months’ absence, was startled into surprise and admiration at the discovery that the pretty child had bloomed into the beautiful girl, he resolved that this should be her last year at school; that whether she should graduate or not graduate at the next annual commencement, he should withdraw her from the Sacred Heart Academy and bring her home “for good.” And then? Marcel kept his future plans to himself. CHAPTER IX DUMB LOVE