ng had
come.

"What are you thinking of, Richard?" she said now. He started and turned
towards her.

"I hardly know," he answered. "My thoughts were drifting."

"Richard," she said abruptly, "I want to thank you."

"Thank me for what, Lali?" he questioned.

"To thank you, Richard, for everything--since I came, over three years
ago."

He broke out into a soft little laugh, then, with his old good-natured
manner, caught her hand as he did the first night she came to Greyhope,
patted it in a fatherly fashion, and said:

"It is the wrong way about, Lali; I ought to be thanking you, not you
me. Why, look what a stupid old fogy I was then, toddling about the
place with too much time on my hands, reading a lot and forgetting
everything; and here you came in, gave me something to do, made the
little I know of any use, and ran a pretty gold wire down the rusty
fiddle of life. If there are any speeches of gratitude to be made, they
are mine, they are mine."

"Richard," she said very quietly and gravely, "I owe you more than I can
ever say--in English. You have taught me to speak in your tongue enough
for all the usual things of life, but one can only speak from the depths
of one's heart in one's native tongue. And see," she added, with a
painful little smile, "how strange it would sound if I were to tell you
all I thought in the language of my people--of my people, whom I shall
never see again. Richard, can you understand what it must be to have
a father whom one is never likely to see again--whom, if one did see
again, something painful would happen? We grow away from people against
our will; we feel the same towards them, but they cannot feel the same
towards us; for their world is in another hemisphere. We want to love
them, and we love, remember, and are glad to meet them again, but
they feel that we are unfamiliar, and, because we have grown different
outwardly, they seem to miss some chord that used to ring. Richard,
I--I--" She paused.

"Yes, Lali," he assented--"yes, I understand you so far; but speak out."

"I am not happy," she said. "I never shall be happy. I have my child,
and that is all I have. I cannot go back to the life in which I was
born; I must go on as I am, a stranger among a strange people, pitied,
suffered, cared for a little--and that is all."

The nurse had drawn away a little distance with the child. The rest of
the family were making their preparations inside the house. There was no
one