"MANORA SUGAR FACTORY, "NEAR RAJAHPORE. "DEAR VERONA, "I am writing in reply to your letter, to assure you that we shall be glad to see you, although we have not much to offer, except a welcome. I fear, after what you have been accustomed to, that you will find our mode of life an uncomfortable change, but you are young and full of hope and courage, and everything will be a novelty. "I am sorry Madame de Godez is dead, and that she had made no provision for you. At the same time, we shall all be pleased to welcome you into what is your real home, and will look for your name in the passenger list of the steamer leaving London the second week in August. Write again, and tell us your plans. "I am, your affectionate father. "PAUL CHANDOS. "P.S.--Your mother sends her love." This epistle was a little disappointing to Verona, the echo to her appeal seemed so faint, but after all it was a letter from her _father_. They were all ready to welcome her, and if not so eager to see her, as she was to see them, she remembered that they were accustomed to family intercourse--they were many living together--she alone out in the darkness, looked towards their hearth as the beacon of her happiness. Verona reflected for a short time, and then decided to show her father's letter to Mrs. Melville, who for her part found it both kind and sensible, and said so, greatly to Verona's relief, and that same day she wrote and engaged her passage by a steamer which sailed in three weeks' time. As she went singing about the garden, culling roses, and accompanied by the dogs, Mr. Melville--a good grave man, with a spade-shaped beard, and a taste for archæology--said to his wife-- "Lucy, I wish we could keep that child with us." "So do I. She has always been one of ourselves, almost ever since she came here, a little decked-out, Frenchified doll, speaking broken English. But her heart is set upon her own people." "Yes, and she knows nothing about them, nor, for that matter, do _we_." "We know that her father is a man of good family--one of the Chandos of Charne." "And the black sheep for all you can tell," interrupted Mr. Melville. "Come, don't make the worst of it, Joe!"