which was set to a brilliant air and accompaniment.

Mr. Laurence sat silent as if buried in deep thought, while she sang a few songs, and then, excusing himself on a plea of indisposition, retired to his room.

"It is useless for Uncle to tell me he is not ill," Dolores remarked, after he had left them alone, "for I notice a great change in him since I last saw him. He looks years older, and he is in a state of great nervousness. I am alarmed about him."

"He is a strange man, is he not?" mused Helena, "but I can not help thinking he would be happier and healthier if he did not live alone. If he had married when young, and was now surrounded by a nice family, how different all his ideas would be. Papa says a bachelor's blood turns to vinegar because he has no one to sweeten life for him."

"But Uncle Laurence is not a bachelor," Dolores said. "He married a very beautiful girl when he was quite young."

"Indeed! then he is a widower? And it was the loss of her, that made him so bitter! But I think it is lovely that he has been true to her memory. There is just romance enough about it to please me."

"No, no!" interrupted Dolores, hastily, "you do not understand. He married her and worshiped her, with a young man's first poetic passion; they lived together two years, and then—and then, Lena, she ran off and left him, and he has never been the same man since."

"Ran off and left him!" echoed Helena in shocked amazement, "why, was she homesick—or was he unkind to her? And did her parents take her back?"

"No, she did not go home. She was—oh, Lena dear, you are too innocent to understand how wicked the world is. I know all about it, because Uncle has told me; he thinks it better for me to be forewarned since I may be left alone to defend myself. Lena, his wife was faithless, and his nearest friend false, and two homes were disgraced forever."

"Oh!" was Helena's only response. She was puzzled and pained to find the world not all like the sweet and holy atmosphere of her own home. But she felt sure that Mr. Laurence's life was a great exception to the rule, which must be peace, harmony and purity in the domestic relations.

As the two girls stood in the pale blue bower which was Dolores's apartment, disrobing for the night, Helena noticed a photograph album lying near at hand. "May I look at the pictures?" she asked, and as she turned the leaves, she uttered an exclamation of delight as her eyes fell on the photograph of a beautiful child, a boy seemingly four or five years old.

"Oh, Dolores, what a cherub! who is this?" she asked. "He is a perfect beauty—and he has your lovely mouth too—is he a relative?"

Dolores leaned over her shoulder and looked at the portrait.

"That? Oh, that is my father's little boy," she said indifferently. "The picture was sent me from California several years ago."

"But I thought you told me you had no brothers or sisters," said Helena, with a puzzled look.

Dolores ran her slender fingers through her silken hair, shaking it down about her like a golden halo.

"Well, I have none," she replied. "I am my mother's only child. He is my father's child, and one is not very much related to one's father any way, you know—and surely not at all to his children by another mother."

"Why, Dolores King!" cried Helena, now thoroughly shocked. "What strange things you are saying! Not related to one's father? Why, it is just as near and sacred a relation as that of a mother."

"Oh, no! child," interrupted Dolores. "Just think what a mother suffers for us, endures for us, goes through for us, from first to last. From the moment we begin to exist, until we can walk alone, we are a physical drain upon our mothers: while our fathers walk free and untrammeled, with only perhaps (and perhaps not even that) the thought of our maintenance to remind them that we have claims upon them. It is only a matter of association and personal pride, which endears most children to their fathers, while their mothers love them naturally. I have never lived with my father, since I was a small infant. I was placed in the care of a nurse, after my mother died, and then my father married again very soon, and my uncle took me home. I am sure my father has no affection for me, and I have none for him. I have seen him but a few times in my life, and I found him in no way attractive to me—and then I always remember how unhappy my mother's brief life was with him, and that makes me almost hate him. So, I am glad we do not meet oftener."

"Oh, Dolores," sighed Helena, looking at her beautiful companion with eyes of absolute compassion, "I think it is terrible for you to feel like this towards your own father. I cannot understand it."

"Well," confessed Dolores, pausing in the tasks of brushing her hair, and looking, in her dainty white robes, as Aphrodite clothed in mist might have looked had she risen from the sea with an ivory hair brush in her hand; "well, sometimes I cannot understand it either. But I once saw a girl with a queer mark on her brow, like the gash of a dagger; and I was told that it was caused by her father being struck down by a robber, right before her mother's eyes. And when I read my mother's diary, kept during her one year of married life, I think may be I was