memories of some long-distant past. "If I could only get my dear father to speak of his old sorrows," she thought to herself, "I might and should know better how to comfort him; but, ignorant as I am of their cause, how can I tell that I may not be opening up some unhealed wound in his heart by words unconsciously and incautiously spoken?"

The reader of this narrative will easily have identified Captain Vincent with the Vincent Fleming of our earlier chapters. Had we wished to conceal this connection, and so create a surprise at last, a thousand other names were at our choice, under cover of which we might have worked out the hidden plot until it was ripe for its dénouement. But, eschewing on this occasion any attempt at dramatic effect, we have only to account, in a few words, for the disappearance of the unhappy man, as told in the former part of our history, and his present reappearance in a distant part of the world, so many years afterwards.

Simply, then, driven by remorse for his complicity in a culpable though involuntary homicide, and believing that his sisters must of necessity thenceforward regard him with settled aversion and horror, Vincent Fleming wandered for awhile through several continental countries, carefully avoiding all intercourse with Englishmen, and adopting the language and manners of those among whom he sojourned. One good effect of his deep grief was, that he forswore gambling from that time forth; and the limited funds with which he was provided at the time of the dire catastrophe being well husbanded, sufficed for his new and almost penurious mode of existence. It did not enter into his mind that his determined silence, and his perpetual self-banishment, would necessarily involve his sisters in additional distress of mind and much complicated embarrassment in worldly affairs; but, like many other persons who act all their lives under the influence of misguided impulse, he took for granted that the course he pursued must necessarily be the right one because he pursued it.

After some time spent in studied seclusion and self-abandoned wretchedness, Vincent Fleming fell dangerously ill. He was at that time lodging in a goatherd's cottage in Switzerland, and he was indebted to the care and attention of the peasant's wife for his ultimate recovery. With convalescence came a feeling of disgust with himself for his past inaction, and a craving desire to return into the world. It was necessary, too, for him to decide on some change in his life; for the resources at his immediate command were not inexhaustible, nor could he replenish his exchequer from home without the risk of betraying his hiding-place.

He bade adieu, therefore, to his entertainers and preservers, crossed the Alps, made his way through France to Holland, and embarked for America with some vague and indefinite notions of employing the remnant of his funds in mercantile pursuits. Long before this he had abandoned the name which, in his mind and in the knowledge of others, was too intimately associated with his former career of vicious dissipation and with the cause of his lasting remorse. By some freak of fancy, however, he chose to retain his given name, and called himself George Vincent.

As George Vincent, then, the fugitive entered on the stage of busy, bustling life in one of the flourishing towns of the New World; and, prospering beyond his expectations in the first ventures he made, he might have lived and died in contented obscurity if the quarrel had not broken out between the colony and the mother-country-a quarrel in which none who lived on the spot were expected to be neutral. Vincent's decision was soon made. Right or wrong, he determined to adhere to the cause of his own native land, gave up his commercial occupations, secured in the best way he was able the small fortune he had already realised, joined the forces of England, and found his loyalty soon rewarded by a commission. What followed has already been briefly recorded.

It is not to be supposed that, in these later years, Vincent

Fleming had forgotten the events of his earlier history; but time and occupation brought with them some alleviation from the pains of his remorse, and the new connections he formed opened to him a happier future than he had formerly dared to hope for. Sometimes, indeed, he thought of his sisters with regret, and justly accused himself of having caused them much sorrow. But this very conviction made him shrink from communicating to them even the fact of his own continued existence. "Better that I should be forgotten," he thought. "They are at least well provided for. They hold possession of the old Priory, precious ruins and all, in which they will never be disturbed while they live." What was to happen after then he left an open question with himself.

As time wore on, and the settler's prosperity increased, it is probable that his thoughts, when turned towards his old home, lost much of their former poignancy, until the last strokes which laid his frail superstructure of earthly happiness so very low. Then memory was once more clothed with terror; for it seemed to him that vengeance, though long delayed, had asserted its right to pursue him and crush his very soul; and the comfort which he might have derived from his remaining child-his Rose of the wilderness was blasted by the belief that she too was doomed to misery and destruction, in expiation of his own guilt.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

UNEXPECTED GUESTS.

ONE day, in the early summer of the year which our story has reached, the solitude of Captain Vincent's settlement was invaded by a rather numerous party of unexpected strangers. Only those who have lived many years in the wilderness can rightly and

fully estimate the pleasure of social intercourse; so that a new face, if it makes its appearance with a friendly smile, calls forth warmer greetings and more profuse hospitality than sometimes, under other circumstances, would be accorded to a familiar acquaintance or an old friend.

In the present instance the guests had no reason to complain of any want of cordial welcome. They were ten in number: of these, six were Englishmen, recently arrived in the country; two were colonists of good position, and officially connected with the Government; the remaining two were friendly Indian guides.

Their story was soon told. They formed part of an exploring expedition sent out by the home Government; their objects were partly political and partly scientific; their destination was understood to be some point in the far north, not exactly defined; their immediate route was to be determined by circumstances; and the time to be occupied in the expedition, as well as its ultimate success, was necessarily to depend on their powers of endurance and the resources which might fall in their way. They were well furnished with appliances for their hazardous undertaking, and were in high spirits, and jubilant in anticipation of the adventures which lay before them-especially the newly imported Englishmen. The two colonials were more sedate in their demeanour, as being more fully aware of the perils and privations they must necessarily pass through, and yet unwilling to damp the ardour of their younger and less experienced companions. The Indian guides alone maintained a gravity which either denoted or counterfeited indifference, and seemed to look with philosophical contempt upon the mercurial society into which for a time they were thrown. This party was separated by two or three days' journey from an equally numerous body, composed of more hardy and accustomed veterans, who had charge of the greater part of their stores, and whom they had preceded, having previously appointed to join at a spot many miles away, to which their

Indians were conducting them through the intricacies of the forest.

The irruption of such a numerous party in the small settlement may be supposed to have caused some inconvenience and embarrassment to the settlers. These slight difficulties, however, were speedily overcome; the hospitable board was soon covered with abundant provisions; beds were made up in every available nook of the farm-house for the white men, the Indians being permitted to follow their own inclinations and devices in camping in the neighbouring forest; and the chiefs of the party were given to understand that the longer they remained at the settlement, the better pleased would be their entertainers.

In fact, apart from the pleasure of exercising the rites of hospitality, and the relief from the monotony of a backwoods life thus afforded to Captain Vincent and his daughter, with their dependants, the visitors brought with them abundant compensation for the trouble they occasioned, in the new life and energy they imparted to the morbid-minded widower, who, for the time, lost sight of his sorrows and dismal apprehensions in the new society thus imposed upon him. Besides this, the strangers were men of mental culture and good intelligence. Rose very soon made this discovery; and a new delight was opened to her in listening to conversations in which she was too retiring to join, and in drinking in new knowledge respecting that distant country which she knew to be her father's birth-land.

To tell the truth, it was a new and somewhat dangerous position in which Rose Vincent was placed-dangerous, we mean, to her future peace of mind and her naturally lively and susceptible imagination. Like the Miranda of The Tempest who, save in the person of her own father, had never seen a fair specimen of nature's manhood till the shipwrecked Ferdinand broke in upon her astonished sight, so Rose, brought up from infancy in the heart of a Canadian forest, and cut off from almost all intercourse