wrote to Miss Plympton. These were never any thing more than short,
formal notes. Such neglect was keenly felt, and Edith, unwilling to
blame her father altogether, tried to make some one else responsible for
it. As she knew of no other human being who had any connection with her
father except this agent, she brought herself gradually to look upon him
as the cause of her father's coldness, and so at length came to regard
him with a hatred that was unreasoning and intense. She considered him
her father's evil genius, and believed him to be somehow at the bottom
of the troubles of her life. Thus every year this man, John Wiggins,
grew more hateful, and she accustomed herself to think of him as an evil
fiend, a Mephistopheles, by whose crafty wiles her father's heart had
been estranged from her. Such, then, was the nature of Edith's
bereavement; and as she mourned over it she did not mourn so much over
the reality as over her vanished hope. He was gone, and with him was
gone the expectation of meeting him and winning his affection. She
would never see him--never be able to tell how she loved him, and hear
him say with a father's voice that he loved his child!

These thoughts and feelings overwhelmed Edith even as she held the
letter in her hand for a new perusal, and she read it over and over
without attaching any meaning to the words. At length her attention was
arrested by one statement in that short letter which had hitherto
escaped her notice. This was the name of the place where her father's
death had occurred--Van Diemen's Land.

"I don't understand this," said she. "What is the meaning of this--Van
Diemen's Land? I did not know that poor papa had ever left India."

Miss Plympton made no reply to this for some time, but looked more
troubled than ever.