Thirteen years before our story opens, Marian had embarked with her father on board a ship which sailed from Liverpool to New York. Of that father she remembered little save that he was very poor, and that he talked of his poverty as if it were something of which he was proud. Pleasant memories, though, she had of an American gentleman who used often to take her on his lap, and tell her of the land to which she was going; and when one day her father laid him down in his berth, with the fever as they said, she remembered how the kind man had cared for him, holding his aching head and watching by him till he died;—then, when it was all over, he had taken her upon his knee and told her she was to be his little girl now, and he bade her call him father—telling her how her own dead parent had asked him to care for her, who in all the wide world had no near relative. Something, too, she remembered about an old coarse bag, which had troubled her new father very much, and which he had finally put in the bottom of his trunk, throwing overboard a few articles of clothing to make room for it. The voyage was long and stormy, but they reached New York at last, and he took her to his home—not Redstone Hall, but an humble farm-house on the Hudson, where he had always lived. Frederic was a boy then—a dark-haired handsome boy of eleven, and even now she shuddered as she remembered how he used to tease and worry her. Still he liked her, she was sure—and the first real grief which she remembered was on that rainy day when, with an extra pull at her long curls, he bade her good-by and went off to a distant boarding school.