"You have always been kind," she replied with the unconscious cruelty of a mind too much preoccupied to be very observant. "Mrs. Allonby and I have often said that you have been a father to us both from the moment we entered the house." Mr. Welbourne started; he turned and looked at the moaning sea, whence the last rose-tints were dying, and then he turned and looked at the mountain peaks, above which a trembling star hung lustrous. "Oh!" he sighed very sadly at last; and Agatha wondered why he looked so sad, not knowing that the last relationship the thin man desired with her was that of a parent. "But that is no reason why either of us should plunder you," she added very kindly and tenderly, as they passed into the shadow of the pines on the other side of the monastery. "I suppose," he rejoined meekly, "that I seem quite--old in your young eyes." "Oh no!" she assured him earnestly, observing, as she took the hand with which he was helping her over the same twisted roots that had afforded Mr. Mosson an opportunity of civility in the morning, that it trembled, and fearing she had hurt his feelings, "I don't think you old at all, dear Mr. Welbourne. In these days people don't even begin to be old till seventy." "I am not yet seventy," murmured the thin man, handing her down the last steep little ledge in the dusk, with a mixture of resignation and despair. "I should think not, indeed," she returned reassuringly, "but I hope," she added in a burst of generous feeling, "that you soon will be." "Good Heavens!" ejaculated the poor man, "soon be seventy!" "I mean," she hastily corrected, "I hope you will live to a good old age--full of honours--with troops of friends----" Oh, Heaven! the kindly patronage in her voice, the gracious condescension of youth to age, the total absence of any feeling but that of cold respect and half pitiful gratitude!--"And that I may have a place among those many friends," she added, regretting to have expressed herself clumsily; she was tired; had had a day of worries, was stupid. "I ought not to bore you with my prosy affairs and blundering surmises," he confessed. And yet, owing either to the malice of some demon, or that madness which comes to those the gods menace with ruin, before they reached the lighted hall full of people, he had made her acquainted with his true age--at which she expressed untimely and unthinking surprise--and the whole state of his worldly affairs, not forgetting the temporary nature and cause of his lameness, and his position in life, besides asking her to honour him by the acceptance of a bunch of carnations, which she did with matter-of-fact calm, hardly remembering a hasty "Thank you" when she left him on the stairs. So the thoughts he confided to the piano in the dusk before dinner that evening were in plaintive minor keys and chords of dissonant intervals slowly resolved.