to the interior, and quite admired himself for giving her such an
advantage: then, too, the house in the city could be sold.

But to whom did he entrust his child? For a while this had been the
great difficulty. In vain he thought over the years he had lived, to
find a friend: he had been too busy to make friends. For an honest
person he had traversed the world too hurriedly to perceive the
deeper, better part of mankind; he had floated on the surface with the
scum and froth, and could recall no one whom he could trust. At last,
away back in the years of his childhood, he saw a face--that of a
young but motherly Irishwoman, who had lived in his father's family as
a faithful servant, and had been a fond partisan of his in his fickle
troubles when a boy.

He sought and found her in his need. She had married, borne children
and grown old: her offspring, after much struggling and little help
from the parent birds, had learned to fly alone, and had left the
home-nest to try their own fortunes. It was not hard for Mr. Archer
to persuade Nurse Bridget and her husband to inhabit his house in the
country and take charge of the baby. In a short time the arrangements
were complete, and the three were installed in comfort, for the busy
man did not grudge money.

If in the long years that followed a thought of the neglected little
one did at times reproach him, he dismissed it with the resolution of
doing something for her when she should be grown up; but at what date
this event was to take place, or what it was that he intended to do,
he did not definitely settle.

The mansion in the country was an old rambling house, in which
there were enough deserted rooms to furnish half a dozen ghosts with
desirable lodgings, without inconvenience to the living dwellers. The
front approach was through an avenue of hemlocks, dark and untrimmed.
Under the closed windows lay a tangled garden, where flowers grew
rank, shadowed by high ash and leafy oak, outposts of the forest
behind--a forest jealous of cultivation, stealthily drawing nearer
each year, and threatening to reconquer its own.

There was an unused well in a corner that looked like the habitation
of a fairy--of a good fairy, I am sure, because the grass grew
greenest and best about the worn curb, and the tender mosses and
little plants that could not support the heat in summer found a refuge
within its cool circle and flourished there.

On the other side of the house, and dividi