five years after he had heard of the birth of Helen's boy, that his own
daughter was born.

She was not the daughter of the first Mrs. Bell, who died of island fever
very soon after Helen Pendennis and her husband, to whom Helen had told
everything, wrote to inform Bell of the birth of their child. "I was old,
was I?" said Mrs. Bell the first; "I was old, and her inferior, was I?
but I married you, Mr. Bell, and kept you from marrying her?" and
hereupon she died. Bell married a colonial lady, whom be loved fondly.
But he was not doomed to prosper in love; and, this lady dying in
childbirth, Bell gave up too: sending his little girl home to Helen
Pendennis and her husband, with a parting prayer that they would befriend
her.

The little thing came to Fairoaks from Bristol, which is not very far
off, dressed in black, and in company of a soldier's wife, her nurse, at
parting from whom she wept bitterly. But she soon dried up her grief
under Helen's motherly care.

Round her neck she had a locket with hair, which Helen had given, ah how
many years ago! to poor Francis, dead and buried. This child was all that
was left of him, and she cherished, as so tender a creature would, the
legacy which he had bequeathed to her. The girl's name, as his dying
letter stated, was Helen Laura. But John Pendennis, though he accepted
the trust, was always rather jealous of the orphan; and gloomily ordered
that she should be called by her own mother's name; and not by that first
one which her father had given her. She was afraid of Mr. Pendennis, to
the last moment of his life. And it was only when her husband was gone
that Helen dared openly to indulge in the tenderness which she felt for
the little girl.