Her mother was of Spanish extraction, the granddaughter of a Cadiz merchant, who had failed in the wine trade and had left his sons and daughters to carve their own way to fortune. Her father had gone to San Francisco at the beginning of the gold fever, had been one of the first to understand the safest way to take advantage of the situation, and had started a wine-shop and hotel, out of which he made a splendid fortune within fifteen years. He acquired wealth in good time to send his two daughters to Paris for their education, and by the time they were grown up he was rich enough to retire from business, and was able to dispose of his hotel and wine-store for a sum which made a considerable addition to his capital. He established himself in a brand-new first-floor in one of the avenues of the Bois de Boulogne, a rich widower, more of an American than a Spaniard after his long exile, and he launched his two handsome daughters in Franco-American society. From Paris they went to London, and were well received in that upper middle-class circle in which wealth can generally command a welcome, and in which a famous barrister, like Mr. Dalbrook, ranks as a star of the first magnitude. James Dalbrook was then at the apogee of his success, a large handsome man on the right side of his fortieth birthday. He was not by any means the kind of man who would seem a likely suitor for a beautiful girl of three and twenty; but it happened that his heavily handsome face and commanding manner, his deep, strong voice and brilliant conversation possessed just the charm that could subjugate Maria Morales’ fancy. His conquest came upon him as a bewildering surprise, and nothing could be further from his thoughts than a marriage with the Spaniard’s daughter; and yet within six weeks of their first meeting at a Royal Academy soirée in the shabby old rooms in Trafalgar Square, Mr. Dalbrook and Miss Morales were engaged, with the full consent of her father, who declared himself willing to give his daughter forty thousand pounds, strictly settled upon herself, for her dowry, but who readily doubled that sum when his future son-in-law revealed his desire to become owner of Cheriton, and to found a family. For such a laudable purpose Mr. Morales was willing to make sacrifices; more especially as Maria’s elder sister had offended him by marrying without his consent, an offence which was only cancelled by her untimely death soon after her marriage. Juanita was only three years old when her father was raised to the bench, and she was not more than six when he was offered a peerage, which he accepted promptly, very glad to exchange the name of Dalbrook—still extant over the old shop-window in Dorchester, though the old shopkeepers were at rest in the cemetery outside the town—for the title of Baron Cheriton.