he soon gave up the attempt
and said that he would go and lie down for a time.

Then followed sad, dark days for little Una--days when all the sunshine
seemed gone out of her life; and Marie moved about the house with slow,
silent steps, and her stern old face puckered up into a hundred
wrinkles with worry and anxious thought.

Monsieur Gen refused to have a doctor to see him; he wanted no strange
faces about the place, he said. And all through those hot August days
he lay quite still in his bedroom, with the blinds down to keep out the
glare of the sun; while Una sat beside him fanning him with a palm-leaf
fan, or bathing his forehead with Eau de Cologne and moistening his
lips with ice, which Marie obtained from the town.

[Illustration: "Una sat beside him, fanning him."]

Then one evening, just as it was getting dark, her father opened his
eyes and looked at her with a smile.

There had been a slight thunderstorm during the afternoon, and the rain
was still falling; and Una thought that perhaps the cooler weather had
made her father feel better.

"Are you better, father?" she whispered.

"Darling, I want you to do something for me," he said. "Go to Mr.
Carew, and ask him to come and see me this evening."

Una slipped from her chair at once. She had wanted so often to fetch
the Vicar to see her father, but had not liked to do so without
permission; and now here was her father asking her to go. With a glad
heart the little girl hurried downstairs and passed out through the
front door.

She knew the way to the vicarage quite well, for she had once or twice
been along the road with Marie, since the day she had first seen the
little Carews through the gate, and had often watched from the Grange
garden while the vicarage children ran along the little lane. But the
lane looked strangely unfamiliar tonight, with the dark clouds scudding
across the face of the moon overhead.

Presently rain began to fall heavily once more, and Una, who had not
waited to put on hat or coat, was drenched to the skin before she
reached the vicarage.

Mr. Carew was sitting writing at his study table when he heard a quick
tap on the window. For a moment he raised his eyes, then, thinking it
was only the branch of a tree tapping against the glass, he went on
writing.

The quick "tap, tap, tap," began again, however; and going to the
window he saw a pale, frightened little face gazing at him from the
other side of the glass.