Phylae, at the first cataract of the Nile.
At the end of the two years he wrote to his sister that he was returning
to Europe, to England, to his own home, and his own people. His little
girl was then five years old.

He reappeared in England changed and aged, but a strong man still, with
a more settled air of strength of purpose than he had worn in his wild
youth. He found his little girl a pretty child, brilliantly healthy,
brilliantly strong. The wind of the mountain, of the heather, of the
woods, had quickened her with an enduring vitality very different from
that of the delicate fair mother for whom his heart still grieved. Of
course the little Helena did not remember her father, and was at first
rather alarmed when Lady Edmond Herrington told her that a new papa was
coming home for her from across the seas. But the feeling of fear passed
away after the first meeting between father and child. The fascination
which in his younger days Rupert Langley had exercised upon so many men
and women, which had made him so much of a leader in his youth, affected
the child powerfully. In a week she was as devoted to him as if she had
never been parted from him.

Helena's education was what some people would call a strange education.
She was never sent to school; she was taught, and taught much, at home,
first by a succession of clever governesses, then by carefully chosen
masters of many languages and many arts. In almost all things her father
was her chief instructor. He was a man of varied accomplishments; he was
a good linguist, and his years of wandering had made his attainments in
language really colloquial; he had a rich and various store of
information, gathered even more from personal experience than from
books. His great purpose in life appeared to be to make his daughter as
accomplished as himself. People had said at first when he returned that
he would marry again, but the assumption proved to be wrong. Sir Rupert
had made up his mind that he would never marry again, and he kept to his
determination. There was an intense sentimentality in his strong nature;
the sentimentality which led him to take his early defeat and the
defection of Sidney Blenheim so much to heart had made him vow, on the
day when the body of his fair young wife was lowered into the sea,
changeless fidelity to her memory. Undoubtedly it was somewhat of a
grief to him that there was no son to carry on his name; but he bore
that grief in silence. H