Nellie’s father was a business-man of a type common in America—­one whose affairs led him here, there and everywhere.  Never quiet while awake, and scarcely at rest during slumber, he resembled Bedreddin Hassan in frequently going to sleep in one town, to awake in another far distant, but without the benighted Oriental’s surprise at the transfer, the afrit who performed this prodigy being a steam-engine, and the magician it obeyed the human mind.

In these rapid peregrinations it would not have been easy for Mr. Archer to carry an infant with him; so, when his wife died and left Nellie to his sole care at six months old, he speedily cast about in his mind to rid himself of the encumbrance.

Having heard that country air is good for children, he sent the little one to the interior, and quite admired himself for giving her such an advantage:  then, too, the house in the city could be sold.

But to whom did he entrust his child?  For a while this had been the great difficulty.  In vain he thought over the years he had lived, to find a friend:  he had been too busy to make friends.  For an honest person he had traversed the world too hurriedly to perceive the deeper, better part of mankind; he had floated on the surface with the scum and froth, and could recall no one whom he could trust.  At last, away back in the years of his childhood, he saw a face—­that of a young but motherly Irishwoman, who had lived in his father’s family as a faithful servant, and had been a fond partisan of his in his fickle troubles when a boy.

He sought and found her in his need.  She had married, borne children and grown old:  her offspring, after much struggling and little help from the parent birds, had learned to fly alone, and had left the home-nest to try their own fortunes.  It was not hard for Mr. Archer to persuade Nurse Bridget and her husband to inhabit his house in the country and take charge of the baby.  In a short time the arrangements were complete, and the three were installed in comfort, for the busy man did not grudge money.

If in the long years that followed a thought of the neglected little one did at times reproach him, he dismissed it with the resolution of doing something for her when she should be grown up; but at what date this event was to take place, or what it was that he intended to do, he did not definitely settle.

The mansion in the country was an old rambling house, in which there were enough deserted rooms to furnish half a dozen ghosts with desirable lodgings, without inconvenience to the living dwellers.  The front approach was through an avenue of hemlocks, dark and untrimmed.  Under the closed windows lay a tangled garden, where flowers grew rank, shadowed by high ash and leafy oak, outposts of the forest behind—­a forest jealous of cultivation, stealthily drawing nearer each year, and threatening to reconquer its own.

There was an unused well in a corner that looked like the habitation of a fairy—­of a good fairy, I am sure, because the grass grew greenest and best about the worn curb, and the tender mosses and little plants that could not support the heat in summer found a refuge within its cool circle and flourished there.