The little house was kept scrupulously clean, but the food was of the plainest, and Aunt Penelope wore the oldest and shabbiest clothes, and she dressed me very badly too. At that time in my career I did not greatly mind about dress. What I did mind was that she never would let me talk about father. She always shut me up or turned the conversation. She had an awful book of musty old sermons, which she set me to read aloud to her the very instant I began to ask her questions about my father, so that by degrees I kept my thoughts to myself. I wrote to father from the very first, but I never got a reply. I used to post the letters myself, so I knew they must have reached him, but he never answered, and as the years went on I wrote less often, for you cannot keep up a correspondence on one side only. I used to wonder at the time if Aunt Penelope kept back his letters to me, but I did not like to accuse her of such a monstrous crime. At last, however, just after I had passed my eighteenth birthday, and was a tall, shabbily-dressed girl, who had learnt all that could be taught at the High School--the only one to which Aunt Penelope could afford to send me--she herself came to me in a state of great excitement, and said that father was returning home. "He is coming to settle in England," she said. "I must be frank with you, Heather, and tell you that it is not at all to your advantage that he should do so." "Aunt Penelope," I answered, "why do you say words of that sort?" "I say them," she replied, "because I know the world and you don't. Your father is not the sort of man who would do any girl the slightest good." "You had better not speak against him to me," I said. "I have taken great pains with you," said Aunt Penelope, "and have brought you up entirely out of my own very slender means. You are, for your age, fairly well educated, you understand household duties. You can light a fire as quickly and deftly as any girl I ever met, and you understand the proper method of dusting a room. You can also do plain cooking, and you can make your own clothes. I don't know anything about your intellectual acquirements, but your teacher, Miss Mansel, at the High School, says that you are fairly proficient. Well, my dear, all these things you owe to me. You came to me a very ignorant, very self-opinionated, silly, delicate little girl. You are now a fine, strong young woman. Your father is returning--he will be here to-morrow." I clasped my hands tightly together. There was no use in saying to this withered old aunt of mine how I pined for him, how his kindly, good-humoured face, his blue eyes, his grizzled locks, had haunted and haunted me for ten long years.