"I don't doubt it, my girl," he answered huskily. "I was young once. I, too, thought I loved a woman--your mother. I foolishly believed that she loved me better than anyone on earth. Ah! You wring from me my confession, because--because it should serve you as a lesson." And he paused with bent head, while Liane held his strong but trembling hand. "It is a wretched story," he went on in a low, harsh voice, "yet you should know it, you who would bind yourself to this man irrevocably. At the time this woman came into my life I was on leave down in the South of France, with wealth, happiness and bright prospects. I loved her and made her my wife. Then I went with my regiment to India, but already my future was blasted, for within a year of my marriage the glamour fell from my eyes and I knew that I had been duped. A fault committed by her threw such opprobrium upon me that I was compelled to throw up my commission, leave her and go back to England. I could not return to my friends in London, because she would discover and annoy me; therefore I have drifted hither and thither, falling lower and lower in the social scale, until, ruined and without means, I became a common blackleg and swindler. But it belongs to the past. It is dead, gone--gone for ever. Those years have gone and my youth has gone. I've lived like other men since then. Heaven knows it has not been a life to boast of, Liane. There have been days and years in it when I dared not trust myself to remember what had been--days of madness and folly, and months of useless apathy. Ah!" he sighed, "I was straight enough before my marriage, but my life was wrecked solely by that woman." His daughter listened intently, and when he had finished she echoed his deep sigh. Her father had never before told her the tragic story. She had always believed that her mother died of fever in India a year after marriage. "Then my mother is not dead?" she observed reflectively. "I do not know. To me she has been dead these eighteen years," he answered, with a stern look upon his hard-set features. A lump rose in his throat, and in his eye there was a suspicion of a tear. "Was she like me?" Liane asked softly, still holding her father's hand and looking up at him. "Yes, darling," he replied. "Sometimes when you look at me I shrink from you because your eyes are so like hers. She was just your age when I married her." There was a long and painful silence. The hearts of father and daughter were too full for words. They were indeed an incongruous pair. He was a reckless gamester, a cunning adventurer, whose career had more than once brought him within an ace of arrest, while she, although prematurely versed in the evil ways of a polyglot world, where the laws of rectitude and morality were lax, was nevertheless pure, honest and good.