Her father had a half-brother (we learned this from his papers), incumbent of rather an important living in the north of England.  We also learned that the brothers had scarcely seen each other twice in a score of years, and had kept up only the most fitful correspondence.  Nevertheless, we wrote to the clergyman, describing the sad case of his niece, and in reply we got a letter, addressed to Nina herself, saying that of course she must come at once to Yorkshire, and consider the rectory her home.  I don’t need to recount the difficulties we had in explaining to her, in persuading her.  I have known few more painful moments than that when, at the Gare du Nord, half a dozen of us established the poor, benumbed, bewildered child in her compartment, and sent her, with our godspeed, alone upon her long journey—­to her strange kindred, and the strange conditions of life she would have to encounter among them.  From the Cafe Bleu to a Yorkshire parsonage!  And Nina’s was not by any means a neutral personality, nor her mind a blank sheet of paper.  She had a will of her own; she had convictions, aspirations, traditions, prejudices, which she would hold to with enthusiasm because they had been her father’s, because her father had taught them to her; and she had manners, habits, tastes.  She would be sure to horrify the people she was going to; she would be sure to resent their criticism, their slightest attempt at interference.  Oh, my heart was full of misgivings; yet—­she had no money, she was eighteen years old—­what else could we advise her to do?  All the same, her face, as it looked down upon us from the window of her railway carriage, white, with big terrified eyes fixed in a gaze of blank uncomprehending anguish, kept rising up to reproach me for weeks afterwards.  I had her on my conscience as if I had personally wronged her.

VI.

It was characteristic of her that, during her absence, she hardly wrote to us.  She is of far too hasty and impetuous a nature to take kindly to the task of letter-writing; her moods are too inconstant; her thoughts, her fancies, supersede one another too rapidly.  Anyhow, beyond the telegram we had made her promise to send, announcing her safe arrival, the most favoured of us got nothing more than an occasional scrappy note, if he got so much; while the greater number of the long epistles some of us felt in duty bound to address to her, elicited not even the semblance of an acknowledgment.  Hence, about the particulars of her experience we were quite in the dark, though of its general features we were informed, succinctly, in a big, dashing, uncompromising hand, that she ‘hated’ them.

VII.

I am not sure whether it was late in April or early in May that Nina left us.  But one day towards the middle of October, coming home from the restaurant where I had lunched, I found in my letter box, in the concierge’s room, two half sheets of paper, folded, with the corners turned down, and my name superscribed in pencil.  The handwriting startled me a little—­and yet, no, it was impossible.  Then I hastened to unfold, and read, and of course it was the impossible which had happened.