One of them contained a history of her father’s life, as we have already stated, telling how his religious views had changed as he drew near manhood, and how he had desired to go to preach to the heathen; how this had angered his father, who, when he found he could not turn him from his purpose, drove him from his home, telling him never to set foot in it again; how he had gone to Africa full of holy zeal, but failing in health, had been obliged to return and settle in a small parish of Derbyshire. Here he had met Miss Chudleigh, who at one time was visiting in the neighborhood, and she sympathizing with him in his views, they had soon grown to love each other, and felt that life would be nothing to them unless spent with each other. When, however, she had insisted upon marrying him in opposition to the wishes of her friends, she also had been discarded by them. “You once questioned me about your name, my child,” he wrote, “and I told you that your grandmother had given it to you. I have sometimes feared I was harsh with you when you asked me about my family, but you understand now why, and forgive me if I seemed so to you. I loved my mother as I never loved any one else save my lost Annie and you, and had she been living, I should never have been so cruelly banished from my home, for I was her favorite child. She was a grand and noble woman, but there was some sorrow connected with her early life which I could never wholly fathom. I once, upon coming suddenly into her room, found her weeping over a portrait, and when I asked her the cause of her grief, she put it hastily out of sight. ‘My boy, I am foolish and wrong to grieve over the past,’ she said; ‘but I once lost a very dear friend, and sometimes feelings arise which I cannot wholly control. I want you to do something for me sometime,’ she added, trying to smile, ‘and that is, if you should ever marry and have a little daughter, you will call her Stella Rosevelt Gladstone.’ ‘I will call her anything you like,’ I answered, earnestly, and then she kissed me with trembling lips and said I was her ‘dear boy.’ This is how you came by your name, my little Star. Stella was my dear mother’s name; ‘Rosevelt,’ I have grown to believe, was one that was sacred to her.” Then there was more about his family relations—about his father and brother. He said there were very few of his kin living; he knew of only one, now that his brother was gone, and that was his only child, Sir Charles Thornton, of Halowell Park, but he had no family; he probably believed that he—Albert Gladstone Thornton—was dead, as everybody else did, and so he had concluded it best to send her—Star—to America, to the care of Mrs. Richards, who had promised to care for her, and who, he felt, would be true to her trust for the sake of the debt which she owed her mother.