Norman was very glad to see a smile in the little invalid’s face again. She had been so ill and weak that with the first return of health she had become petulant and fretful, sobbing bitterly sometimes when Norman had to tear himself away to rejoin his exacting wife, who begrudged every moment spent with his little protégée. “Why don’t the pritty yady tum to see me?” she had asked, wistfully, more than once, and Mrs. de Vere had been obliged to explain to her that Camille feared infection from the fever. The child was quite intelligent, and comprehended so clearly that she asked no more for the proud woman, only looked with wistful longing for Norman’s daily visits, and the pretty gifts of toys that he always brought to amuse her in her loneliness. She had one formula always for thanking him, and that was the simple one, “I ’ove oo,” with which she had charmed him on their first acquaintance. That she truly meant it was quite evident from the confiding way in which it was said as she leaned her dear little head against him and looked up at him with the beautiful deep-blue eyes that looked so large now in the little pearl-fair face. She loved Mrs. de Vere, her faithful, tender nurse, too, but not in the absorbing way that she did Norman. When he was with her she seemed to care for no one else, and his mother sighed even while the little one’s devotion amused her, for she felt that this strange bond of tenderness between her son and the child whose life he had saved only lent color to Camille’s degrading suspicions of her husband. The mother knew her son too well to share in these suspicions, and the knowledge of them in her daughter-in-law’s breast was hard to bear. “The child will live. What will be her future if her friends are never found?” she said to herself after the crisis of the fever had passed, and Sweetheart had lived instead of dying, as every one expected. She prayed daily that Sweetheart’s friends might be found, for she did not trust Camille’s protestations of regard for the child. She had not been deceived like Norman by Finette’s clever lie. She comprehended all Camille’s jealous hatred and deceit, yet not for worlds would she have whispered her suspicions to Norman. No, let him go on living in his Fool’s Paradise as long as it would last, she thought, sadly. “And it will come to an end the sooner if this beautiful little one remains here. His penchant for the child will drive Camille desperate,” thought the clear-headed woman, and she prayed all the more earnestly that Sweetheart’s people might be found. All unconscious of the trouble she had brought into Verelands, Little Sweetheart lavished a full heart’s affection on these two who were so kind to her, never seeming to think of the past until this twilight hour when she sat on Norman de Vere’s knee, with her golden head against his breast. There was a thoughtful expression on the sweet little face, And all at once she murmured, pathetically: “I want Mattie.”