There was something in this voice at once penetrative and sweet; but now she was again conscious of what sounded like a delicately-hinted reproof.
"A young man," he proceeded, "whom I have known almost all my life--in fact, I may call him a friend of mine--told me of an event that had taken place--he called it a misfortune that had befallen him.

It had greatly unsettled him, he said, for a long time; and now that he was getting over it, and wanted to forget it, he wished for a change, would like to go abroad, and asked if I could help him.

I have many foreign acquaintances.

It so chanced that I had just been applied to by one of them to send him out an Englishman, a clerk, to help him with his English correspondence.

So I proposed to this young fellow to go, and he gladly consented." Laura said nothing.