“Oh, Marcel, how could you? How could you do such a thing?” she cried, reproachfully—“how could you treat the dee-ar old home that way? It is not familiar; it is not the same at all! I do not know it at all! Oh, I am so disappointed and so sorry!” “My dear, I thought to have given you a pleasant surprise. I thought only of your happiness,” replied the poor colonel. “And I expected to find the dee-ar old place just as I left it! Just as I left it! And, oh! look there!” “What now, my dear?” “Oh, Marcel! what have you done to the old sea-wall and the dee-ar old fishing landing, where I and David Lindsay used to play when we were children?” “My dear, that fishing landing was a nuisance to sight and smell. See what a pretty pier and boat-house are built on its site,” said Colonel de Crespigney. “Oh, Marcel! how could you? How could you? You have spoiled everything! You have spoiled everything! You have killed the dee-ar old place! Instead of a living being in poor old clothes, it is a dead corpse in fine dress and flowers. Oh, I shall never see the dee-ar old house and the dee-ar old landing again! If I had known this I would never have come back! I might as well have stayed in Europe. Oh, I am so disappointed and so sorry I could break my heart!” cried the girl, with a piteous look of distress into the face of her guardian; but there she met an expression of so much misery that her tone changed instantly from reproaches to self-condemnation. “Oh, what a selfish, ungrateful wretch I am, dee-ar Marcel! And such an idiotic little fool besides. You did it all to please me, and I ought to be glad and grateful, and so I shall be when I have sense enough to appreciate it all; dee-ar Marcel, forgive me,” she pleaded, bending forward to lay her cheek against his whiskered face, as she had been used to do in her childhood. “I am only so grieved, my child, to have given you pain instead of pleasure; but no doubt I am but a blundering brute!” sighed the colonel. “Oh, no, no; you are the very best and dearest and most unselfish one in the world. I cannot remember the time when I did not love and honor you above all other ones on earth!” “My little Glo’, it was all the more reason I should have studied your nature and planned for your happiness more intelligently,” sadly replied the colonel. “Oh, Marcel! Don’t say that, or I shall think you have not forgiven me. You have studied my happiness more than I deserved. You have done the very best for me always. In regard to these changes, they certainly do make a great improvement, which I shall be sure to appreciate and enjoy. It was only just at first, when I was looking to see the dee-ar old place in its old familiar face, that the change struck me as a disappointment, and I am such a fool for blurting out my very first thoughts and feelings!” said Gloria, caressing her uncle.