Wilfrid, smiling.
"It's your turn."

Lady Henry's face grew sombre.

[Illustration: "LADY HENRY LISTENED EAGERLY"]

"All very well," she said. "What did your tale matter to you? As for
mine--"

The substance of hers was as follows, put into chronological order:

Lady Rose had lived some ten years after Dalrymple's death. That time
she passed in great poverty in some _chambres garnies_ at Bruges, with
her little girl and an old Madame Le Breton, the maid, housekeeper, and
general factotum who had served them in the country. This woman, though
of a peevish, grumbling temper, was faithful, affectionate, and not
without education. She was certainly attached to little Julie, whose
nurse she had been during a short period of her infancy. It was natural
that Lady Rose should leave the child to her care. Indeed, she had no
choice. An old Ursuline nun, and a kind priest who at the nun's
instigation occasionally came to see her, in the hopes of converting
her, were her only other friends in the world. She wrote, however, to
her father, shortly before her death, bidding him good-bye, and asking
him to do something for the child. "She is wonderfully like you," so ran
part of the letter. "You won't ever acknowledge her, I know. That is
your strange code. But at least give her what will keep her from want,
till she can earn her living. Her old nurse will take care of her, I
have taught her, so far. She is already very clever. When I am gone she
will attend one of the convent schools here. And I have found an honest
lawyer who will receive and pay out money."

To this letter Lord Lackington replied, promising to come over and see
his daughter. But an attack of gout delayed him, and, before he was out
of his room, Lady Rose was dead. Then he no longer talked of coming
over, and his solicitors arranged matters. An allowance of a hundred
pounds a year was made to Madame Le Breton, through the "honest lawyer"
whom Lady Rose had found, for the benefit of "Julie Dalrymple," the
capital value to be handed over to that young lady herself on the
attainment of her eighteenth birthday--always provided that neither she
nor anybody on her behalf made any further claim on the Lackington
family, that her relationship to them was dropped, and her mother's
history buried in oblivion.

Accordingly the girl grew to maturity in Bruges. By the lawyer's advice,
after her mother's death, she took the name of her old _gouvernante_,
and was known th