“Little did I think you were in such straits!” he said, stroking the child’s head, and waiting as though her presence were a restraint on inquiries, but she eagerly availed herself of the pause.  “Aunt Ermine, please what shall I say about the chairs?  Will you have the nice one and Billy when they come home?  I was to take the answer, only you did talk so that I could not ask!”

“Thank you, my dear; I don’t want chairs nor anything else while I can talk so,” she answered, smiling.  “You had better take a run in the garden when you come back;” and Rose replied with a nod of assent that made the colonel smile and say, “Good-bye then, my sweet Lady Discretion, some day we will be better acquainted.”

“Dear child,” said Ermine, “she is our great blessing, and some day I trust will be the same to her dear father.  Oh, Colin! it is too much to hope that you have not believed what you must have heard!  And yet you wrote to him.”

“Nay, I could not but feel great distrust of what I heard, since I was also told that his sisters were unconvinced; and besides, I had continually seen him at school the victim of other people’s faults.”

“This is best of all,” exclaimed Ermine, with glistening eyes, and hand laid upon his; “it is the most comfortable word I have heard since it happened.  Yes, indeed, many a time before I saw you, had I heard of ‘Keith’ as the friend who saw him righted.  Oh, Colin! thanks, thanks for believing in him more than for all!”

“Not believing, but knowing,” he answered—­“knowing both you and Edward.  Besides, is it not almost invariable that the inventor is ruined by his invention—­a Prospero by nature?”

“It was not the invention,” she answered; “that throve as long as my father lived.”

“Yes, he was an excellent man of business.”

“And he thought the concern so secure that there was no danger in embarking all the available capital of the family in it, and it did bring us in a very good income.”

“I remember that it struck me that the people at home would find that they had made a mistake after all, and missed a fortune for me!  It was an invention for diminishing the fragility of glass under heat; was it not?”

“Yes, and the manufacture was very prosperous, so that my father was quite at ease about us.  After his death we made a home for Edward in London, and looked after him when he used to be smitten with some new idea and forgot all sublunary matters.  When he married we went to live at Richmond, and had his dear little wife very much with us, for she was a delicate tender creature, half killed by London.  In process of time he fell in with a man named Maddox, plausible and clever, who became a sort of manager, especially while Edward was in his trances of invention; and at all times knew more about his accounts than he did himself.  Nothing but my father’s authority had ever made him really look into them,