As to Lord Skene, I think, in his equitable old heart, he disliked his ward as much as I loathed her. But there were other considerations to influence him. She was at least the daughter of her mother, and might have been so different had his plans not miscarried. His dead boy, his shattered hope, for ever figured in the perspective of his past life. That also, perhaps, might have been so different--might have come to record no lapse upon ancient rogueries, had his hope duly taken shape and maturity. But the son had disappeared, and the father was left derelict. How it had all happened was a topic quite taboo in these days. A portrait of the boy hung in his room--a fresh, saucy young face, bright with a wholesome determination to live enjoyably, but wilful and a little imperious. I used to love to look at it, when I dared to steal in unobserved. It conveyed a sort of challenge and help to me in one. And he had been dead--how long? Years piled on years now; and no one knew where his bones lay. He had been climbing in the Italian Alps with his tutor, a travelling comrade, and, it was supposed, had fallen into a crevasse, or down a precipice while exploring the heights alone, and thereafter had never been seen. Mr Delane, the tutor, had given evidence of his parting with him on such and such a day, and there was an end of the matter. Charlie Skene had been wiped out, and with him all the elaborately compiled record of his father’s schemes and ambitions for him. “He was near twenty-one,” said Miss Christmas--“I know: and Lord Skene wanted him to marry my mother. And where would you have been then, you little low boy?” “Where would you have been?” I retorted. “Here, of course,” she said, “and the daughter of a lord. And my lord wouldn’t have wanted to marry again then; and I’m sure I shouldn’t have wanted you.” “You wouldn’t have got me if you had,” I said. “I hate you?” “O!” she cried, affectedly aghast, and ran off to Lady Skene to complain of the dreadful language I had used. She wore her hair in a bag-net, and I have always detested the fashion. She might have been called pretty, I suppose, by those who find a charm in pertness franked by large eyes, and a wicked dimple in a smooth cheek. But childhood can see no beauty in what it dislikes. Instinctive sympathy with itself, with its moods and difficulties, is its criterion of loveliness.