When Lady Dudleigh arrived there with Hugo and her son, she soon found out this, and this fact enabled her to carry into execution a plan which she had cherished all along during the voyage. She obtained a sheep farm about a hundred miles away, applied to the authorities, and was able to hire Dalton as a servant. Taking him in this capacity, she went with him to the sheep farm, where Hugo and Reginald also accompanied them. One more was afterward added. This was the man “Wilkins,” who had been sentenced to transportation for poaching, and had come out in the same ship with Dalton. Lady Dudleigh obtained this man also, under Dalton's advice, and he ultimately proved of great assistance to them. Here in this place years passed away. Dalton's only thought was of his daughter. The short formal notes which were signed “John Wiggins,” all came from him. He could not trust himself to do any more. The sweet childish letters which she wrote once or twice he kept next his heart, and cherished as more precious than any earthly possession, but dared not answer for fear lest he might break that profound secret which he wished to be maintained between her and himself--her, the pure young girl, himself, the dishonored outcast. So the years passed, and he watched her from afar in his thoughts, and every year he thought of her age, and tried to imagine what she looked like. During these years there was rising among them another spirit--a character--whose force was destined to change the fortune of all. This was Reginald. From the first he had known the whole story--more than Leon had known. Leon had known his father's guilt and Dalton's innocence, but Reginald had been the confidant of his mother, the witness of her grief and her despair. He had lived with Dalton, and year after year had been the witness of a spectacle which never ceased to excite the deepest emotion, that of an innocent man, a just man, suffering wrongfully on behalf of another. His own father he had learned to regard with horror, while all the enthusiastic love of his warm young heart had fixed itself upon the man who had done all this for another. He knew for whom Dalton had suffered. It was for his mother, and for himself, and he knew that he was every day living on the sufferings and the woe of this broken-hearted friend. Gradually other motives arose. He was a witness of Dalton's profound and all-absorbing love for his daughter, and his passionate desire to save her from all knowledge of his own shame. To Reginald all this grew more and more intolerable. He now saw the worst result of all, and he felt that while his own father had thrown upon his friend his load of infamy, so he himself, the son, was throwing upon Edith Dalton all that inherited infamy.