delights to them. Tears were shed again when the portrait had to be
packed up and despatched. Rhoda lived on abashed by the adorable new
refinement of Dahlia's features, and her heart yearned to her uncle for
so caring to decorate the lovely face.

One day Rhoda was at her bed-room window, on the point of descending to
encounter the daily dumpling, which was the principal and the unvarying
item of the midday meal of the house, when she beheld a stranger trying
to turn the handle of the iron gate. Her heart thumped. She divined
correctly that it was her uncle. Dahlia had now been absent for very
many months, and Rhoda's growing fretfulness sprang the conviction in her
mind that something closer than letters must soon be coming. She ran
downstairs, and along the gravel-path. He was a little man,
square-built, and looking as if he had worn to toughness; with an evident
Sunday suit on: black, and black gloves, though the day was only
antecedent to Sunday.

"Let me help you, sir," she said, and her hands came in contact with his,
and were squeezed.

"How is my sister?" She had no longer any fear in asking.

"Now, you let me through, first," he replied, imitating an arbitrary
juvenile. "You're as tight locked in as if you was in dread of all the
thieves of London. You ain't afraid o' me, miss? I'm not the party
generally outside of a fortification; I ain't, I can assure you. I'm a
defence party, and a reg'lar lion when I've got the law backing me."

He spoke in a queer, wheezy voice, like a cracked flute, combined with
the effect of an ill-resined fiddle-bow.