Here was no weak confession. Throughout his life this man had been seeking a good woman's love. Knowing in his heart that he had done things unworthy of it, he sought it yet more ardently for that very reason. One woman, his wife, had understood him and given him of her whole soul generously. Her death left him a vagrant once more. In vain he, a miser to others, lavished generous gifts upon Evelyn, his child. "She would love me if she could," he told himself, "but there is a chord in her nature I cannot strike." A keen observer of intuitive faculty would have said that the man's nature, not the woman's, in Evelyn Forrester forbade her to respond to his affection. Of this Evelyn herself remained quite unconscious. Fret as she might against her father's unjust and inexplicable treatment of her, she would have resented hotly the suggestion that she had not a daughter's love for him. Her very obedience, she thought, must be sufficient witness to that. Though he made a prisoner of her, she rarely uttered a complaint. His varying moods, now of doting affection, now of irritation and temper, found her patient and silent. When he did a mean thing she shuddered, but rarely spoke of it, because she knew that words would not help her. Her own life had been lived so far apart from his. She wished with all her heart that it had not been so; but she could not justly blame herself for circumstances she was in no way able to control. This had been her attitude before her great escapade in London; it remained her attitude upon her return to Derbyshire. She met her father each morning at the breakfast table; dined with him in solemn state at night--occasionally received visits from their neighbors, and was some times the guest of the vicar of the parish, a pleasant old Cambridge Don, by name Harry Fillimore. But in the main Evelyn lived alone, in the wild glades of the beautiful park, down by the silent pool of the river--just as she had lived and dreamed in the old days of the longing for the world, its glamour and its glories. And now she had a great secret to take to the green woods with her. Day by day, as some sylph of the thickets, the true Romany child reacted the thrilling scenes of the brief weeks of triumph in London. Her hair wild about her shoulders, her eyes reflecting the dreams, she would crouch by the river's bank and play Narcissus to the reeds. "It was I, Etta ... yes, yes ... just the little Etta looking up from the waters--I went to London--I played at the theatre--they said I was a success--they offered me money--to Etta Romney, just little Etta Romney. And now it's all over. Etta is dead, and Evelyn has come back. I shall never go to London again--I shall die, perhaps, down there among the reeds in the river. Oh, if some one only would love me, some one understand me. And it's for ever in this lonely place--for ever--for ever."