"Dear Louise," said Mr Durocher, "how feelingly you sing that charming song of my native land! What happiness I used to anticipate in pointing out to your now sainted mother--when wealth, achieved through a long and tedious exile, should enable me to resume, in my Normandy, the station from which losses had reduced my family--all the beautiful scenes so familiar to my childhood. God destroys such hopes to draw our affections away from the things of earth. 'Tis now for you only, my beloved child, that I at all consider a worldly future. You will have wealth; few of the daughters of France born upon the soil will be heirs to such a fortune. But there are cares also belonging to the possession of riches; and how will an inexperienced young girl like you know how to meet these?" "Do not trouble yourself about me, my dear father," said the affectionate daughter. "Is not your health improving? Every day since we left Kingston you have gained strength. You will live yourself to see your money safely invested and your daughter's future secured. Let us hope that many, many happy years on earth await us." "If future years are in store for me, Louise," replied Mr Durocher, "they may be cheerful when blessed by your presence, but I cannot be happy where your mother is not. I feel convinced, however, that I shall soon meet her again; I am impressed with a feeling--though I know not why--that I shall never more see France." The young lady left her seat beside the harp and sat upon a chair near to the sofa on which her father was reclining. She placed her arm round his neck, and took in her disengaged hand one of his. "Dearest father," she said, in a tender and soothing tone of voice, "these low spirits are but the lingering effects of your illness. Life must still have much happiness in store for you. The grand and beautiful scenes of day and night, upon land and water, exhibiting, as they ever do, a proof of the power and goodness and love of God towards His creatures, must have an influence leading to happiness upon every human soul. I am sure that one so good as you must feel this blessed influence." "I do feel it, my dear child," said the invalid; "but that feeling cannot remove the uneasiness which I experience at the conviction that I must soon leave you alone in the world. I have a number of relations in France; but you are unknown to all of them; even I, so long has it been since I have met any of them, must be nearly, if not quite forgotten." The speaker paused awhile in reflection. Louise was also silent; she could make no reply to her father's last observation; its probable truth admitted of no just objection. Mr Durocher at length spoke again--