"Oh, father, I will, I will!" cried Una. "Only—only I don't quite see how I can let out a secret if I don't exactly know what it is."
"I cannot tell you all the secret, little Una," said her father—"at least not until you are older and can understand more about it. But if I were to let you make friends and go about wherever you like people would begin to wonder where you came from, and who you were, and to ask you questions about me and what I did; and although not really knowing my secret, you might let out little bits of it, until people began to wonder and talk about you and me. One can never be too careful," he added, half to himself.
"Yes, I understand, father," said Una gravely; and she sat at her father's feet, looking into the fire and not talking much, until the little clock on the mantelpiece struck seven, and Marie came to tell her that it was bedtime.
"I wonder whether I was wise in telling her so much," Monsieur Gen thought to himself, when his little daughter had gone. "But it seemed the only thing to be done, and she is prudent beyond her years, poor little, lonely girl. I do not think she will chatter about anything I have told her."
For some time after this Una was rather quiet and sad, more like what she had been when Norah and Dan first got to know her, and not nearly so ready to laugh and play as she had been of late.
The secret her father had told her weighed heavily on the little girl's mind—she was so afraid that she might have let out to her little friends, though unknowingly, something about her father's work, and she was careful now not to say anything which might lead them to ask questions about him.
One afternoon she was walking by herself in the wood, when she came across Tom seated on the ground with a number of paper bags and packages strewn around him.
