She looked up at him with admiring blue eyes, and added: “I am glad that you were brave enough to marry your love, in spite of the opposition of your rich relations. Not many a young man would be so brave and true.” He said to himself, shrewdly: “This lovely child has had a romance in her life already. The pain of an aching heart throbs through her bitter little speeches. Her pride has been wounded by some vulgar rich person, no doubt.” And he looked tenderly at the little beauty, while he said: “There are plenty of young men who would marry the girl they love in spite of the whole world. I am glad I was one of them, and I had two years of almost perfect happiness with my darling--two years in which a lovely little daughter came to us--a girl who would be about as old as you, my child, if she had lived. Alas! she is dead--she and her mother!” His voice trembled, his face grew pale, she read keen despair in his dark-blue eyes. “I must hasten with my story,” he cried, mournfully. “I have told you I was happy with her only two years. Well, at the end of that time my father sent for me to come down to one of his estates in the country--a dreary place in Cornwall that we seldom visited, and that was half a ruin. We thought--my wife and I--that he meant to forgive us at last, and I went joyfully, for I did not know he had a heart of stone. “I met him at that grim old pile of ruins, and he tried to bribe me to divorce my darling wife and desert my child. When I refused indignantly, he--can you imagine anything so horrible?--made his minions thrust me into a dungeon of the old castle, and swore to me I should die there unless I consented to his plan. “I steadily refused, and I remained his prisoner almost fifteen years, while he gave it out to the world that I had wearied of my American wife and gone to travel in far countries. “Is it not a wonder that my heart did not break in those cruel years? At last Heaven took pity on my tears and prayers, and stretched my inhuman parent on a bed of death. Then he had me brought to his bedside, and implored my pardon for what he had done, after confessing that my poor wife, believing his diabolical tale that I had deserted her, had eked out a toilsome existence for herself and babe in London for a few years, then returned to her native land, and he knew not what had been her fate thereafter.