ers?"

"No; or if they did come, they were lost, being directed probably to the
care of poor old grannie, as ours was. We thought it so odd, after she
was dead, you know."

Thus the boy chattered on--his tongue had not shortened with his
increasing inches--and every idle word sank down deep in his old
governess's heart.

Then it was only her whom Robert Roy had forsaken. He had written to his
boys, probably would have gone on writing had they answered his letter.
He was neither faithless nor forgetful. With an ingenuity that might
have brought to any listener a smile or a tear, Miss Williams led the
conversation round again till she could easily ask more concerning that
one letter; but David, remembered little or nothing, except that it was
dated from Shanghai, for his brothers had had a discussion whether
Shanghai was in China or Japan. Then, boy-like, they had forgotten the
whole matter.

"Yes, by this time every body had forgotten him," thought Fortune to
herself, when having bidden David good-by at her door and arranged to
meet him again--he was on a visit at Brighton before matriculating at
Oxford next term--she sat down in own room, with a strangely bewildered
feeling. "Mine, all mine," she said, and her heart closed itself over
him, her old friend at least, if nothing more, with a tenacity of
tenderness as silent as it was strong.

From that day, though she saw, and was determined henceforward to see, as
much as she could of young David Dalziel, she never once spoke to him of
Mr. Roy.

Still, to have the lad coming about her was a pleasure, a fond link with
the past, and to talk to him about his future was a pleasure too. He was
the one of all the four--Mr. Roy always said so--who had "brains" enough
to become a real student; and instead of following the others to India,
he was to go to Oxford, and do his best there. His German education had
left him few English friends. He was an affectionate, simple-hearted
lad, and now that his mischievous days were done, was taking to thorough
hard work. He attached himself to his old governess with an enthusiasm
that a lad in his teens often conceives for a woman still young enough to
be sympathetic, and intelligent enough to guide without ruling the errant
fancy of that age. She, too, soon grew very fond of him. It made her
strangely happy, this sudden rift of sunshine out of the never-forgotten
heaven of her youth, now almost as far off as heaven itself.