CHAPTER VI.

TONOONE, not even to Thomas Kenwood (in whom I confided most), did I impart the discovery just described. Again and again I went to examine those letters, jealous at once of my secret, and fearful lest they should vanish. But though they remained perhaps unaltered, they never appeared so vivid as on that day.

With keener interest I began once more to track, from page to page, from volume to volume, the chronicled steps of limping but sure-footed justice.

Not long after this I was provided with a companion. “Clara,” said my guardian one day at breakfast, “you live too much alone. Have you any friends in the neighbourhood?”

“None in the world, except my mother.”

“Well, I must try to survive the exclusion. I have done my best. But your mother has succeeded in finding a colleague. There’s a cousin of yours coming here very soon.”

“Mother dear,” I cried in some surprise, “you never told me that you had any nieces.”

“Neither have I, my darling,” she replied, “nor any nephews either; but your uncle has; and I hope you will like your visitor.”

“Now remember, Clara,” resumed my guardian, “it is no wish of mine that you should do so. To me it is a matter of perfect indifference; but your mother and myself agreed that a little society would do you good.”

“When is she to come?” I asked, in high displeasure that no one had consulted me.

“He is likely to be here to-morrow.”

“Oh,” I exclaimed, “the plot is to humanize me through a young gentleman, is it? And how long is he to stay in my house?”

“In your house! I suppose that will depend upon your mother’s wishes.”

“More likely upon yours,” I cried; “but it matters little to me.”

He said nothing, but looked displeased; my mother doing the same, I was silent, and the subject dropped. But of course I saw that he wished me to like his new importation, while he dissembled the wish from knowledge of my character.

Two years after my father’s birth, his father had married again. Of the second wedlock the only offspring was my guardian, Edgar Vaughan. He was a posthumous son, and his mother in turn contracted a second marriage. Her new husband was one Stephen Daldy, a merchant of some wealth. By him she left one son, named Lawrence, and several daughters. This Lawrence Daldy, my guardian’s half-brother, proved a spendthrift, and, while scattering the old merchant’s treasure married a fashionable adventuress. As might be expected, no retrenchment ensued, and he died in poverty, leaving an only child.

This boy, Clement Daldy, was of my own age, or thereabout, and, in pursuance of my guardian’s plan, was to live henceforth with us.

He arrived under the wing of his mother, and his character consisted in the absence of any. If he had any quality at all by which one could know him from a doll, it was perhaps vanity; and if his vanity was singular enough to have any foundation, it could be only in his good looks. He was, I believe, as pretty a youth as ever talked without mind, or smiled without meaning. Need it be said that I despised him at once unfathomably?

His mother was of a very different order. Long-enduring, astute, and plausible, with truth no more than the pith of a straw, she added thereto an imperious spirit, embodied just now in an odious meekness. What