To his wife he explained all his worldly affairs, He received fifty pounds a year from his farm in France. This would continue for the next few years. There was also a small sum in hand, enough for his funeral and present expenses. To Cecile he spoke of other things than money--of his early home in the sunny southern country, of her mother, of little Maurice. He said that perhaps some day Cecile could go back and take Maurice with her to see with her own eyes the sunny vineyards of the south, and he told her what the child had never learned before, that she had a grandmother living in the Pyrenees, a very old woman now, old and deaf, and knowing not a single word of the English tongue. "But with a loving heart, Cecile," added her father, "with a loving mother's heart. If ever you could find your grandmother, you would get a kiss from her that would be like a mother's kiss." Shortly after Maurice D'Albert died, and the children lived on with their stepmother. Without loving them, the second Mrs. D'Albert was good to her little stepchildren. She religiously spent all their father's small income on them, and when she died, she had so arranged money matters that her sister Lydia would be well paid with the fifty pounds a year for supporting them at her farm in the country. This fifty pounds still came regularly every half-year from the French farm. It would continue to be paid for the next four years, and the next half-year's allowance was about due when the children left London and went to the farm in Kent. The few days that immediately followed Mrs. D'Albert's death were dull and calm. No one loved the poor woman well enough to fret really for her. The child she had lost was far away and knew nothing, and Lydia Purcell shed few tears for her sister. True, Cecile cried a little, and went into the room where the dead woman lay, and kissed the cold lips, registering again, as she did so, a vow to find Lovedy, but even Cecile's loving heart was only stirred on the surface by this death. The little girl, too, was so oppressed, so overpowered by the care of the precious purse of money, she lived even already in such hourly dread of Aunt Lydia finding it, that she had no room in her mind for other sensations; there was no place in the lodgings in which they lived to hide the purse of bank notes and gold. Aunt Lydia seemed to be a woman who had eyes in the back of her head, she saw everything that anyone could see; she was here, there, and everywhere at once. Cecile dared not take the bag from inside the bosom of her frock, and its weight, physical as well as mental, brought added pallor to her thin cheeks. The kind young doctor, who had been good to Mrs. D'Albert, and had written to her sister to come to her, paid the children a hasty visit. He noticed at once Cecile's pale face and languid eyes. "This child is not well," he said to Lydia Purcell. "What is wrong, my little one?" he added, drawing the child forward tenderly to sit on his knee.