By the dying embers of a wood fire they two lingered one December night, wrapped in no pleasant thoughts, and idly listening to the shrill piping of a wind that dismally foretold the coming of snow. The father was a man well advanced in life, on whose good-looking, weak face dissipation had set its seal; the daughter, a woman of six or seven and twenty, who preserved more than all her father's good looks, but--as is so often the case in the females of a decadent family--who, in her expression, showed no trace of weakness. Indeed, if a fault could be found in face or figure, it was that the former for a woman told of too much firmness and resolution, qualities which circumstances might very readily develop into obstinacy, and even into cruelty. Her mother had died when Helen was but an infant, and thus it chanced that, as a child, her upbringing had been left pretty well to nature, aided (or perhaps hampered) only by the foolish indulgence of an ignorant and not very high-principled nurse, in whom fidelity was perhaps the only virtue, and who now, in her old age, almost alone of a once large staff of servants, still clung to "her bairn," and to the fallen fortunes of her master. Of education the child received but what little she chose to receive, and of discipline she knew nothing, for to the hopelessly weak father her will had too soon become law. Naturally, Helen grew up headstrong and self-indulgent, recognising no rule but that of her own inclinations, and before her eighteenth birthday she had, without the knowledge of her father, engaged herself to a penniless youth of good family, the younger son of a neighbour. An entire lack of funds, however, seemed--at least to the lad--sufficient cause for delaying the marriage, and "to mak' the croon a pound," he went, not "to sea," but (as was then not uncommon with young Scotsmen) to the wars in High Germanie. Since that date, no direct word had come from the young man, only the rumour grew that in the storming of some town he had fallen. Years had passed since then; years that came and went and brought neither confirmation nor denial of the rumour. In Helen's heart hope at last was killed, and with the death of hope seemed to die all that had ever been womanly or soft in her character. The one tender spot left was a kind of pitying affection for her weak old father.