"You'll have a house of your own to manage some day," answered her father gaily, "and a husband too, you little witch. I'm sure I don't envy him!"
But his face fell while he spoke; for he was thinking, when the fatal time came, what should he do without his darling, the light, and joy, and comfort of his home?
Miss Helen blushed. Perhaps she too had not been without her maiden dreams of some such contingency hereafter. Perhaps she had foreshadowed to herself the semblance of a future lord, whom she would tend as fondly and love even more devotedly than papa. Perhaps already that phantom shape had been filled in and coloured, and appeared visibly in the flesh.
"Halloo, young woman!" exclaimed Sir Henry, tossing another letter across the table, "here's something for you! An enormous envelope, stamped with the arms of the Household Cavalry. Bravo, Nell! Have they offered you a cornetcy, or a situation as bandmaster, or what?"
The blush deepened on Helen's face till it spread to the roots of her thick dark hair; but she put back the unopened letter in her father's hand, and, stealing round his chair, leaned on his shoulder, while she stood behind him.
"Read it, papa," said she; "nobody in the world can have anything to say to me that ought not to come to you first."
Again that pang of remorse shot through him, as he remembered his own unworthiness. "What a good girl I have got!" he thought; "and what a poor, irresolute wretch I am! I cannot trust myself for a day! I ought to be better; I wish I could try to be better! Here have I been, ready to gamble away my child's position and her every-day comfort for the sake of a pair of black eyes and lanthorn jaws that I had never seen a month ago, that I don't care for half as I do for Nell!—that don't care a brass farthing for me! And I'd do it again, I know, under temptation—that's the worst of it! Ah! I wish I had led a different life, for Nelly's sake. I wonder if it's too late to begin now?"
Then he read his daughter's letter, a correct and harmless production as could possibly be addressed to a young lady under the immediate supervision of her papa, consisting indeed but of a few choice lines, to express, with much politeness, the writer's intention of "availing himself of Sir Henry's kindness, and of trespassing on his hospitality for a couple of days' hunting the following week," with a studied apology for addressing the daughter of the house, according to her father's express directions, who had feared he might be away from home when the letter arrived; the whole concluding with a vague allusion to a ball of the previous season, which might mean anything, or might not.
"I told him to write to you, Nelly," said Sir Henry, tearing the letter across and throwing it into the waste-paper basket; "it's lucky I did, for I had forgotten all about it. And now I'm not quite sure which of these fellows it is, they're all so alike, and they all ride chestnut horses with great liberality, I must admit. Vanguard, Vanguard—which was Vanguard? The little fellow with light hair, or the stout man who spilt sherry over your dress? I believe I asked them all here next week."
"Nonsense, papa!" replied Helen; "you're thinking of Sir Charles Carter and Mr. Peacock. Captain Vanguard is the gentleman we met at Lady Clearwell's, and who was so civil about his brougham when our carriage got smashed."