Sylvia could not bear any longer this mockery of her mother's love, and, bursting into the kitchen, she began to abuse Valentine with all the vulgar words she had learned from Blanche. Valentine caught her sister by the shoulders and shook her violently: _"Tu seras bien avec ton père, sale gosse!"_ Then she smacked her cheek several times and left the house. Sylvia flung her arms round her father. "Take me with you," she cried. "You hate her, don't you? Take me, father." Henry rose and, in rising, upset the bottle of brandy. "Thank God," he said, fervently. "My own daughter still loves me." Sylvia perceived nothing ludicrous in the tone of her father's speech, and happy tears rose to her eyes. "See! here is the time-table. Must we go to-night? Sha'n't we go to-night?" She helped her father to pack; at midnight they were in the train going north. CHAPTER II THE amount of brandy that Henry Snow had drunk to support what he called his misfortune made him loquacious for the first part of the journey. While he and Sylvia waited during the night at a railway junction, he held forth at length not merely upon the event that was driving him out of France, but generally upon the whole course of his life. Sylvia was glad that her father treated her as if she were grown up, because having conceived for him a kind of maternal solicitude, not so much from pity or affection as from the inspiration to quit Lille forever which she gratefully owed to his lapse, she had no intention of letting him re-establish any authority over herself. His life's history, poured forth while they paced the dark platform or huddled before the stove in the dim waiting-room, confirmed her resolve.