"By accident," replied Helmsley, with a laugh, "and kindly fate favoured me by allowing me to see my first daylight in the South rather than in the North. But I was never naturalised as an American. My father and mother were both English,--they both came from the same little sea-coast village in Cornwall. They married very young,--theirs was a romantic love-match, and they left England in the hope of bettering their fortunes. They settled in Virginia and grew to love it. My father became accountant to a large business firm out there, and did fairly well, though he never was a rich man in the present-day meaning of the term. He had only two children,--myself and my sister, who died at sixteen. I was barely twenty when I lost both father and mother and started alone to face the world." "You have faced it very successfully," said Vesey; "and if you would only look at things in the right and reasonable way, you have really very little to complain of. Your marriage was certainly an unlucky one----" "Do not speak of it!" interrupted Helmsley, hastily. "It is past and done with. Wife and children are swept out of my life as though they had never been! It is a curious thing, perhaps, but with me a betrayed affection does not remain in my memory as affection at all, but only as a spurious image of the real virtue, not worth considering or regretting. Standing as I do now, on the threshold of the grave, I look back,--and in looking back I see none of those who wronged and deceived me,--they have disappeared altogether, and their very faces and forms are blotted out of my remembrance. So much so, indeed, that I could, if I had the chance, begin a new life again and never give a thought to the old!" His eyes flashed a sudden fire under their shelving brows, and his right hand clenched itself involuntarily. "I suppose," he continued, "that a kind of harking back to the memories of one's youth is common to all aged persons. With me it has become almost morbid, for daily and hourly I see myself as a boy, dreaming away the time in the wild garden of our home in Virginia,--watching the fireflies light up the darkness of the summer evenings, and listening to my sister singing in her soft little voice her favourite melody--'Angels ever bright and fair.' As I said to you when we began this talk, I had something then which I have never had since. Do you know what it was?" Sir Francis, here finishing his cigar, threw away its glowing end, and shook his head in the negative. "You will think me as sentimental as I am garrulous," went on Helmsley, "when I tell you that it was merely--love!" Vesey raised himself in his chair and sat upright, opening his eyes in astonishment. "Love!" he echoed. "God bless my soul! I should have thought that you, of all men in the world, could have won that easily!" Helmsley turned towards him with a questioning look.