The child, encouraged by his tender manner to herself--more than all, her beautiful necklet--often hung with confidence and familiarity about him, and with pretty pertinacity questioned him about his past adventures, where he had been and what he had seen, if he ever had a wife, and much more to the same effect, as if his past life were of interest to her, as it was no doubt beginning to be to her mamma; and on this occasion, by a simple remark, she made both feel quite uncomfortable. Resting her elbows on his knee, and planting her little face between her hands, she looked up in his eyes and said, 'Captain Dalton, do you come to see me or mamma?' 'I come to see both,' replied Dalton, smiling as he stroked her bright hair. 'But you talk so much more to mamma than to me.' 'You are a little girl, Netty; well?' 'That I think--I think----' 'What? A penny for your thoughts.' 'That you are in love with mamma. Is it so?' Strange to say, at this remark Dalton grew very pale, while Mrs. Trelawney, though she coloured considerably, laughed excessively at the situation thus created, but was rather surprised that Dalton failed to take advantage of it, even to pay her, as he could easily have done, a well-turned compliment. 'Netty seems to have quite a matrimonial interest in you, Captain Dalton,' said she, still laughing. 'Yes; she has more than once asked me if I ever had a wife.' Mrs. Trelawney, while her own bright eyes were partly hidden by the shade on the globe of the lamp, was keenly scrutinizing the half-averted face of her admirer. 'You have not been always a woman-hater?' she asked. 'I never was--far from it--the reverse,' said he, hastily. 'And yet in all those years you have never fallen in love?' 'I never thought of it till I came back to England. One does not think of marriage up country in the land of brown squaws.' 'And so you never thought of it?' 'Never.' Dalton was colouring deeply now, and she extracted his answers from him 'as if she had been extracting his teeth,' as she afterwards told Alison. 'Now, however, under better auspices, and at home, I may wish to change,' he began. 'Change what?' interrupted Mrs. Trelawney, with a curious sharpness of tone; 'to reform? I have read that we often hear of a woman marrying a man to reform him, but that no one ever heard of a man marrying a woman to reform _her_.' Dalton felt that his love-making, if love-making it was, took a strange turn now, and that she was infusing banter or rebuke into the conversation. 'I cannot comprehend, Mrs. Trelawney, how it is that when I am with you,' said Dalton, gravely, with a soft and half-broken voice, 'there comes back upon me much of my past life, or rather a portion of it, that I would fain forget.' 'How is this?' 'Because you have some strange and magnetic influence over me, to which I have not as yet the key. I have sought to bury, to forget that past I refer to--to live it down----'