“A year or two!” cried Edna, as if she spoke of eternity. Her father smiled. “The time will pass very quickly,” he said. “In a year or two, when you come home, both your mother and you will be glad to meet each other. We sometimes grow to think kindly of the absent.” The girl buried her face in her hands. “Tut, tut, Edna, my own little girl!” cried her father, placing his chair beside hers and taking her almost in his arms. “One would think you were being sent off to Africa. I imagined you would be glad.” “It isn’t that,” she sobbed. “It shows how dreadfully wicked you must think me when you are compelled to send me away.” “Nonsense, Edna! It shows nothing of the kind. I can’t send your step-mother to boarding-school, can I? Well, then! I don’t think you wicked at all. I have not the slightest doubt but you said just what you were provoked to saying. There now; see what a hopeless admission that is to make to a rebellious daughter. No, no. I am not blaming you in the least. As I said before, I am blaming nobody. We are driven by circumstances, that is all.” “And am I never to see you except when I come home?” “My darling girl, that is the delightful part of it. You will see me, and I will see you, practically more often than we do now. What do you think of that? I shall select some excellent school, situated in a bracing spot near the sea. I believe it will be cheaper for me to take a season ticket on the railway there, I shall go so often. We will take long walks on the downs entirely alone, and talk of everything. We will have delightful little dinners at the wayside inns we discover, and now and then a grand luncheon, at some very expensive place with a window that looks over the Channel. Edna, it will be the rejuvenating of your old father. He rarely gets a sniff of ozone as things are now, but then----” Edna, with a cry of joy, flung her arms around his neck. “Oh, father,” she cried, “that is too good to be true! When can I go?” “This very week, I hope. You see now how everything depends on the point of view.” CHAPTER XIX. With the words “starved to death” ringing in his ears, Langly walked to Chelsea. Bitterly he accused himself for his stupid blindness; all this had been going on for days, and he had had no suspicion of it. She had from the first undoubtedly stinted herself so that her father might not go hungry, and when, at last, the real pinch came, she was too weak to resist it. Her father, isolated by his temper from any friends who might have seen what was happening and given warning in time, had also been unconscious of what was passing before his eyes. His gruff independence had slowly famished his own daughter. “Starved to death!” in the richest city in the world,--the granary of the nations, into whose ample lap pours the golden wheat from every country under the sun that ripens it.