“But—­pardon me, Madame—­” said Graham, “as your brother’s only surviving relative—­so at least I understood him to say—­you surely become the natural guardian of his child.”

“My brother and I renounced each other, and parted years ago, Monsieur; were you at all intimate with him?”

“Not in the least,” replied Graham; “I knew nothing, or next to nothing, of him, till I attended him in his last illness; it was by the merest accident that I became, in any way, mixed up in his affairs.”

“Then you are probably unaware of the character he bore,” Therese Linders said, suddenly exchanging her air of cold constraint for a voice and manner expressive of the bitterest scorn; “he was a gambler by profession, a man of the most reckless and dissipated life; he plunged by choice into the lowest society he could find; he broke his mother’s heart before he was one-and-twenty; he neglected, and all but deserted his wife; he ruined the lives of all who came in his way—­he was a man without principle or feeling, without affection for any living being.”

“Pardon me, Madame,” Graham said again, “he was devotedly attached to his little daughter, and—­and he is dead; to the dead much may surely be forgiven,” for indeed at that moment his sympathies were rather with the man by whose death-bed he had watched than with the bitter woman before him.

“There is no question of forgiveness here,” says Madame the Superior, with a slight change of manner; “I bear my brother no malice; it was not I that he injured, though he would doubtless have done so had it been in his power.  In separating myself from him, I felt that I was only doing my duty; but I have kept myself informed as to his career, and had I seen many change or hope of amendment, I might have made some steps towards reconciliation.”

“And that step, Madame,” Graham ventured to say, “was taken by your brother on his death-bed——­”

“Are you alluding to this letter, Monsieur?” she inquired, crushing it in her hand as she spoke, “you have forgotten its contents strangely, if you imagine that I consider that as a step towards reconciliation.  My brother expresses no wish of the kind; he was no hypocrite at least, and he says with sufficient plainness, that he only turns to me as a last resource.”

And, in fact, the letter was, as we know, couched in no very pleasant or conciliatory terms, and Graham was silenced for the moment.  At last, ——­

“He appeals to your mother’s memory on behalf of his child,” he said.

“He does well to allude to our mother!” cried the Superior.  “Yes, I recognise him here.  He does well to speak of her, when he knows that he broke her heart.  She adored him, Monsieur.  He was her one thought in life, when there were others who—­who perhaps—­but all that signifies little now.  But in appealing to my mother’s memory he suggests the strongest reason why, even now that he is dead, I should refuse to be reconciled to his memory.”