into his head that the English children looked healthy and happy, and
he thought it might give him pleasure to bring up his little son and
daughter as English children. He took the baby of three months, and
the girl of a little over two years, to England; and, in a poor and
obscure corner of the great world of London, established himself with
his babies. Poor man! the cold and damp English climate proved
anything but the climate of his dreams. He caught one cold, then
another, and after two or three years entered a period of confirmed
ill-health, which was really to end in rapid consumption. His
children, however, throve and grew strong. They both inherited their
young mother's vigorous life. The English climate mattered nothing to
them, for they remembered no other. They learned to speak the English
tongue, and were English in all but their birth. When they were
babies their father stayed at home, and nursed them as tenderly as
any woman, allowing no hired nurse to interfere. But when they were
old enough to be left, and that came before long, Cecile growing
_so_ wise and sensible, so dependable, as her father said,
D'Albert went out to look for employment.

He was, as I have said, a man of some culture for his class. As he
knew Spanish fluently, he obtained work at a school, as teacher, of
Spanish, and afterward he further added to his little income by
giving lessons on the guitar. The money too came in regularly from
the French chateau, and D'Albert was able to put by, and keep his
children in tolerable comfort.

He never forgot his young wife. All the love he had to bestow upon
woman lay in her Pyrenean grave. But nevertheless, when Cecile was
six years old, and Maurice four, he asked another woman to be his
wife. His home was neglected; his children, now that he was out so