'Aunt Myrtle, my dear aunt!' Jacinth heard the kind, cheery voice exclaim, though in accents broken by sudden emotion. 'You who have been so good to us, to whom I owe my life. But this—this coming yourself is the kindest of all.'

Then Jacinth turned and fled—fled down a path leading somewhere or nowhere, till she found herself at the other side of the house, and ran full tilt against Bessie, who was coming out to see what was happening. For sounds carried far in the clear frosty air, and visitors were an event at the little St Rémi villa.

'Jacinth,' she exclaimed, catching hold of the flying girl, 'what is it?'

'Oh Bessie, it's everything—everything beautiful and wonderful. But we mustn't interrupt them. Take me into the house and call Camilla and your mother, and I'll explain it all.'

That was the beginning, but by no means the end. Far from it indeed. For even if Jacinth lives to be a very old woman, I think she will always look back upon the next few weeks at Basse—the weeks before the Harpers returned to England, which they did before the doctors considered it quite safe for Lady Myrtle to face the northern spring—as among the happiest she ever knew. There were several reasons for this. There was the great and unselfish pleasure of seeing the quiet restful content on her dear old friend's face, and knowing that in some measure she had been the means of bringing it there; there was the delight of writing home with the news of the happy state of things that had come about, and receiving her full meed of sympathy and appreciation from her father and mother and faithful little Frances; and lastly, there was the, to Jacinth, really new pleasure of thoroughly congenial companionship of her own age. For at school her habit of reserve and self-dependence had come in the way of her making friends, and she was so accustomed to taking the lead and being the elder, that she was slow to enter into the give and take on more or less equal ground that is an essential condition of pleasant and profitable intercourse between the young.

And her ideal friend—much as she learned to love and esteem hearty generous Bessie and gentle little Margaret—Jacinth's friend of friends came to be Camilla, whose two or three years' seniority seemed only to bring them closer, for Jacinth was in many ways 'old for her age.'

Yes, it was a happy time, even though now and then some twinges of self-reproach made Jacinth feel how little she had at one time merited the loving confidence with which her new friends treated her.

'But that you must bear, my dear,' said Lady Myrtle, when on one or two occasions this feeling grew so acute that she had to express it to some one. 'Take it as your punishment if you think you deserve it. For it would be cruel to distress these candid, unselfish girls by confessions of ill-will or prejudice which no longer exist. For my sake, dear Jacinth, for my sake too, try now to "let the dead past bury its dead."'

And the girl did so.