This task of secrecy was not a difficult one. Dalton's was not a nature to speculate on possible mischances so much as to hope for impossible good turns of fortune; and when he knew that Kate had sent him money, and Frank did not ask for any, the measure of his contentment was filled. Kate was a Princess, and Frank an officer of hussars; and that they were as happy as the day was long he would have taken an oath before any “justice of the quorum,” simply because he saw no reason why they ought not to be so; and when he drank their healths every day after dinner, and finished a bumper of champagne to their memory, he perfectly satisfied his conscience that he had discharged every parental duty in their behalf. His “God bless you, my darling child!” was the extent of his piety as of his affection; and so he lived in the firm belief that he had a heart overflowing with good and kind and generous sentiments. The only unpleasant feelings he had arose for Nelly. Her eyes, that in spite of all her efforts showed recent tears; her pale face; her anxious, nervous manner worried and amazed him. “There 's something strange about that girl,” he would say to himself; “she would sing the whole day long when we hadn't a shilling beyond the price of our dinner; she was as merry as a lark, cutting out them images till two or three o'clock of a morning; and now that we have lashings and leavings of everything, with all manner of diversions about us, there she sits moping and fretting the whole day.” His ingenuity could detect no explanation for this. “To be sure, she was lame, and it might grieve her to look at dancing, in which she could take no part But when did she ever show signs of an envious nature? She was growing old, too,----at least, she was six or seven-and-twenty,--and no prospect of being married; but was Nelly the girl to grieve over this? Were not all her affections and all her hopes home-bound? 'T was n't fretting to be back in Ireland that she could be!--she knew little of it before she left it.” And thus he was at the end of all his surmises without being nearer the solution. We have said enough to show that Nelly's sorrow was not causeless, and that she had good reason to regret the days of even their hardest fortune. “Had we been but contented as we were!” cried she; “had we resisted ambitions for which we were unfitted, and turned away from 'paths in life' too steep and too arduous for our strength, we might have been happy now! Who can say, too, what development of mind and intelligence should not have come of this life of daily effort and exertion? Frank would have grown manly, patient, and self-relying; Kate would have been, as she ever was, the light of our home, making us sharers in all those gifts of her own bright and happy nature; while even I might have risen to worthier efforts of skill than those poor failures I have now to blush for.”