"Never mind my looks, George," Harriet said, cheerfully; "I am very well. Get on with your breakfast and your story. Routh will be here presently, and I want to know all about it before he comes. He gets impatient at my feminine curiosity, you know." The smile with which she spoke was but the ghost of her former smile, and George still looked at her strangely, but he obeyed her, and proceeded with his breakfast and his story. "I don't know very much about my mother's family," he said, "because they did not like her marriage with my father, and she kept aloof from them, and her parents were dead before she had the opportunity of appeasing them by making the fine match they would have considered her marriage with Mr. Carruthers to be. I know that some of their relatives were settled in America,--some at New York, some in South Carolina,--and my mother's brother, Mark Felton--queer name, puritanical and fanatical, with a touch of the association of assassination about it--was sent out to New York when quite a child. I forgot to tell you it was my mother's stepfather and her mother who objected to her first marriage--her own father died when she was an infant; and on her mother's second marriage with a Mr. Creswick--a poor, proud, dissipated fellow, I fancy, though I never heard much about him--the American branch of the family sent for the boy. My mother has told me they would have taken her too, and her stepfather would not have made the least objection--we haven't been lucky in stepfathers, Mrs. Routh--but her mother would not stand it; and so she kept her child. Not for many years, for she married my father when she was only seventeen. Her brother was just twenty then, and had been taken into the rich American firm of his relatives, and was a prosperous man. She knew very little of him, of course. I believe he took the same view of her marriage as her mother had taken; at all events, the first direct communication between them took place when my mother was left a handsome and poor young widow, with one boy, who did not make much delay about proving himself the graceless and ungrateful son you know him to have been." George's voice faltered, and an expression of pain crossed his face. Harriet looked at him kindly, and laid her soft white hand on his. "That is all over, you know," she said. "You will not err in that way again."