“Seventeen, perhaps.  Possibly, though, she’s older.”

“And you, Mr. Harrington—­how old are you, please?  I’ll never tell as long as I live, if you don’t want me to.”

She knew he was becoming rather sensitive with regard to his age, but she thought he would not mind her knowing, never dreaming that she of all others was the one from whom he would, if possible, conceal the fact that he was thirty-eight.  Still he told her unreservedly, asking her the while if she did not consider him almost her grandfather.

“Why, no,” she answered; “you don’t look old a bit.  You haven’t a single grey hair. I think you are splendid, and so I’m sure did the mother of Eloise; didn’t she?” and the roguish black eyes looked up archly into the blind man’s face.

Remembering what Grace had said of his love affair in Europe many years since, and adding to that the evident interest he felt in little Eloise Temple, the case was clear to her as daylight.  The Swedish maiden was the girl who jilted Richard Harrington, and hence his love for Eloise, for she knew he did love her from his manner when speaking of her and the pains he had taken to find her.  He had not answered her last question yet, for he did not understand its drift, and when at last he spoke he said,

“Mrs. Temple esteemed me highly, I believe; and I admired her very much.  She had the sweetest voice I ever heard, not even excepting yours, which is something like it.”

Edith nodded to the bright face on the mirror opposite, and the bright face nodded back as much was to say, “I knew ’twas so.”

“Was she really handsome, this Mrs. Temple?” she asked, anxious to know how Richard Harrington’s early love had looked.

Instinctively the hands of the blind man met together round Edith’s graceful neck, as he told her how beautiful that Swedish mother was, with her glossy, raven hair, and her large, soft, lustrous eyes, and as he talked, there crept into Edith’s heart a strange, inexplicable affection for that fair young Swede, who Richard said was not as happy with her father-husband as she should have been, and who, emigrating to another land, had died of a homesick, broken heart.

“I am sorry I cursed her to-day,” thought Edith, her tears falling fast to the memory of the lonely, homesick woman, the mother of Eloise.

“Had she married Richard,” she thought, “he would not now be sitting here in his blindness, for she would be with him, and Eloise, too, or some one very much like her.  I wish she were here now,” and after a moment she asked why he had not brought the maiden home with him.  “I should love her as much as my sister,” she said; “and you’d be happier with two of us, wouldn’t you?”

“No,” he answered; “one young girl is enough for any house.  I couldn’t endure two.”

“Then I ought to go away,” said Edith promptly, her bosom swelling with a dread lest she should eventually have to go.  “Eloise has certainly the best right here.  You loved her mother, yon know, and you’d rather have her than me, wouldn’t you?”