“Well, and sure that’s true, sir,” rejoined Mrs. Bainbridge plaintively; “and die he did, poor fellow, like a lamb too, at last! Winny, poor girl, had kep up till then, doing what she could, which wasn’t much, for she was never strong, for all the lovely colour that was in her cheeks; but when Tom died she just faded away as well. He was always kind to her was Tom, and she’d a grateful heart, the crathur. Little Honor (we called her Honor after grandmother) was scarcely two months old then; but grandmother was a rare one to bring up a child by hand, and when Winny was taken, the child went to live altogether with the old people, till they died, that is to say; and after that--she was a pretty little gurl of seven years old then, and I’d been lady’s-maid to my Lady Kilkenny for six years and more--I put her to an English school, and had her taught the pianner and poetry, and the branches, thinking as she’d make her living as a governess in a genteel family; and so indeed she did, for she was two years, to a month a’most, teaching the little ones at Clay Farm, and earning her twenty pounds a year, and they making as much of her all the time as if she had been a child of their own. It’s little I’ve seen of the child, poor thing--I thought it was better not; girls will be asking questions, and what was I to say to her if she did? Best let her think she was an orphan; so, even when I have been in the country with ‘the family,’ I haven’t let her know; for I couldn’t have had such a young person as that in the housekeeper’s room at Sir Richard’s. So there it was--” “Yes--and there it was--at that farm-house, I mean--that John Beacham fell in love with her pretty face and married her. I see it all now, and she is--let me see--not much over eighteen, eh?” “I should think you ought to know as much of that as I do,” said Mrs. Bainbridge, bridling. “It’s nineteen year come September since you used to meet poor Winny of an evening in Lord Kilkenny’s demesne--and more shame for you to be desaving an honest girl that way. I declare you’re not worthy, that you ain’t, to be the father of such a sweet gurl as that, no, nor of such a pretty gurl, neither, for I don’t see that she favours you at all, while she’s as like her blessed mother as two peas in a pod.” “Like! I should think she was! Why, it’s the same face! The same hair and eyes, and the same--” “Ah! that’s just it!” broke in the widow passionately; “and it’s because I caught Colonel Fred Norcott looking in the _same_ way at those pretty blue eyes and that beautiful hair, as he used to do at the poor girl’s that’s dead and gone, I thought it time to speak.” “But I didn’t know,” said the Colonel, reddening this time with legitimate shame and anger. “How was I possibly to know that--”