Up-stairs he abused them to Viola with a violence of phrase that would have amazed them. Even to Mrs. Seymour he permitted himself to indulge his wrath to the extent of biting sarcasms at their expense. The landlady soothed him by assuring him that they were of an inferior class to himself. This was some consolation to the colonel, but he avoided their society with a hauteur which was quite thrown away on them, and his life became lonelier and more purposeless than ever. Cut off still further from his fellows, longing for, yet afraid to court, the society of his daughter, the old man found himself in a position of distressing isolation. In his dreariness he turned for amusement and solace to the one person left in the house who had neither the self-consciousness to bore, the experience to judge by, nor the cruelty to mock. This was Corinne, Mrs. Seymour's little girl, a grave, large-eyed, lean-shanked child of eight. The alternate spoiling and scolding that the boarders awarded her had developed in Corinne a chill disbelief in human nature. As a rule she held off from those about her who would one day buy her kisses with a bag of candy, and the next, when she was singing to her doll on the balcony, would box her ears for making a noise. The vagaries of humanity were a mystery to her, and she had already acquired a cautious philosophy, the main tenet of which was to go her own way without demand or appeal to her fellow-creatures. Corinne, if not as experienced as her mother, was possessed of those intuitive faculties which distinguish many neglected children. She knew after the first week that neither the colonel nor Viola would blow hot and cold upon her little moods. Still, there was a prudent reticence in her acceptance of their overtures, and she took the colonel's first gifts of fruit and candy with a wary apprehension of the next day's rebuffs. But they never came, and the prematurely grave child and the lonely old man established friendly relations, grateful and warming to both. Finally, when the other boarders drove the colonel back into the citadel of his wounded pride, the tie between them was strengthened. Each felt the isolation of the other as a secret bond of sympathy and understanding.