Bell married a colonial lady, whom he 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.