that his heart failed him. It was not that he had any aversion to Juliet
herself. He had been fond of the child, and he liked the girl. It was the
awkwardness of his position that filled him with a kind of despair.

"If only somebody would marry her!" he thought, as he sat opposite to her
at the dinner-table, on the night that she returned for the last time
from school.

The thought cheered him. Juliet, he noticed for the first time, had
become singularly pretty. He engaged a severe Frenchwoman of mature age
as chaperon, and made spasmodic attempts to take his adopted daughter
into such society as the Belgian port, where he was consul at this time,
could afford.

It was not a large society; nor did eligible young men figure in it in
any quantity. Those there were, were foreigners, to whom the question of
a _dot_ must be satisfactorily solved before the idea of matrimony would
so much as occur to them.

Juliet had no money. Lady Byrne had left her fortune to her husband, and
rash speculations on his part had reduced it to a meagre amount, which he
felt no inclination to part with. Two or three years went by, and she
received no proposals. Sir Arthur's hopes of seeing her provided for grew
faint, and he could imagine no way out of his difficulties. He himself
spent his leave in England, but he never took the girl with him on those
holidays. He had no wish to be called on to explain her presence to such
of his friends as might not remember his wife's whim; and, though she
passed as his daughter abroad, she could not do that at home.

Juliet, for her part, was not very well content. She could hardly avoid