"When _can_ I see my pretty lady again?" asked Harold, suddenly. "If you are going to marry her, do you mean to take her quite, quite away? When may I see her?" "Before very long, I hope, my dear boy," answered Hinton. "He has talked of her so often," said the mother. "I never saw any one who in so short a time so completely won the heart of a little child; I believe the thought of her helped to make him well. Ah! how thankful I am when I look at him; but Mr. Hinton, there is another thing which gives me great joy just now." "And that?" said Hinton. "Last night something very wonderful happened. I was at home not two hours, when I was surprised by a visit from one whom I had never seen before and whom I had supposed to be in his grave for over twenty years. My dear mother had one brother who went to Australia shortly after her marriage. From Australia the news reached her of his death. He was not dead; he came back again. I had a visit from that uncle last night." "How strange!" said Hinton. "Yes; I have not heard his story yet. He met my little Daisy in Regent's Park, and found out who she was through her likeness to my mother. Is it not all like a romance? I had not an idea who the dear old man was when he came to visit me last night; but how glad I am now to feel that my own mother's brother is still alive!" Hinton asked a few more questions; then after many promises of effecting a meeting very soon between Charlotte and little Harold he went away. He was puzzled by Mrs. Home. The anxious woman he had thought of, whose sad face often haunted him, was gone, and another peaceful, happy, almost beautiful in her serenity, had come in her place. Her joy at Harold's recovery was both natural and right; but where had the money cares vanished to? Surely Charlotte's fifty pounds could not have done more than pay the Torquay trip. As to her delight over her Australian uncle's return, he rather wondered at it, and then forgot it. He little guessed, as he allowed it to vanish from his mind, how it was yet to influence the fate of more lives than his. CHAPTER XXXII. JASPER'S TERROR.