Shortly after Maurice D'Albert died, and the children lived on with
their stepmother. Without loving them, the second Mrs. D'Albert was
good to her little stepchildren. She religiously spent all their
father's small income on them, and when she died, she had so arranged
money matters that her sister Lydia would be well paid with the fifty
pounds a year for supporting them at her farm in the country.

This fifty pounds still came regularly every half-year from the
French farm. It would continue to be paid for the next four years,
and the next half-year's allowance was about due when the children
left London and went to the farm in Kent.

The few days that immediately followed Mrs. D'Albert's death were
dull and calm. No one loved the poor woman well enough to fret really
for her. The child she had lost was far away and knew nothing, and
Lydia Purcell shed few tears for her sister. True, Cecile cried a
little, and went into the room where the dead woman lay, and kissed
the cold lips, registering again, as she did so, a vow to find
Lovedy, but even Cecile's loving heart was only stirred on the
surface by this death. The little girl, too, was so oppressed, so
overpowered by the care of the precious purse of money, she lived
even already in such hourly dread of Aunt Lydia finding it, that she
had no room in her mind for other sensations; there was no place in
the lodgings in which they lived to hide the purse of bank notes and
gold. Aunt Lydia seemed to be a woman who had eyes in the back of her
head, she saw everything that anyone could see; she was here, there,
and everywhere at once. Cecile dared not take the bag from inside the
bosom of her frock, and its weight, physical as well as mental,
brought added pallor to her thin cheeks. The kind young doctor, who