"Nay, my lord," he said, "the village wept with me over her supposed death when I was a young man and alone in my misery, and I was glad of their comfort; but now that I am old and near to my own grave I have no craving for their sympathy, and as I told her many a time ere she passed hence, I can better bear alone at my years either joy or sorrow than brook their strife of tongues, and perchance the words of blame they might cast upon her. My heart is grown too aged to bear the ceaseless chatter, from which it were vain to try and escape, were it known that my daughter had wedded an Earl of Bryn Afon; and moreover I will ne'er suffer your noble name to be miscalled, as it would surely be, were it known that you had chosen for your bride one of your own villagers. I can keep my secret, my lord, and though I thank you for the honour you would fain do me in making known my relation to your noble house, I do still refuse it with as steadfast a will as when first my daughter made herself known to me. Let me but look from time to time upon my grand-daughter's sweet face, and come and go in your castle as her humble foster-father and your devoted servant, and I will die more content with my secret within mine own breast than blazoned forth among all the curious folk of the country-side. Verily, my lord, they would in a few short hours wear out my poor heart with their gossiping tongues whatever!" "So be it, Jack," answered the earl; "but as my true father-in-law, it seemed to me the only reparation I could make for the past, to acknowledge you as such. Think how in past days, with her, whom you believed long since dead, dwelling, unknown to you, here at my side within these walls, I could come and go with you on yon river, and talk lightly of my marriage and my wife! Yet, Jack, my love for her was my excuse, for fain would I have confessed our marriage many a time, and did but keep silence because of her pleadings, which I was verily wont at times to look upon as strange and unnatural, but which now, in the light of that mother's love, burning secretly like a fierce fire in her poor breast, do fully explain themselves to my mind. You were her child's best guardian, and since that fair little being, to whom my heart was ever strangely drawn, must needs be hidden from my knowledge, if not wholly from my sight, she was unable to reveal herself to you without betraying to me her cherished secret. And so--well, Jack--my sin in luring her from your side to a secret marriage has been bitterly punished by its own fruits! And to my dying day the pale sweet face of our child, innocent victim of the sins of her forefathers, must haunt me, as I first looked upon it, now nearly a year ago, with all a father's pride in its wondrous beauty, and beheld in it those terrible marks of suffering which the sacrifice of her love had wrought! Never shall I forget that day of our first meeting as father and daughter, nor the anguish with which