"Then, the moment I laid eyes on you my heart melted and my soul went out to you--I instantly saw in you purity and beauty--indeed you are even more beautiful than your mother was, Belle-Ann--your mother whose sole offense was her stubborn refusal to marry the man whom we thought best fitted for her; and then she ran away and married a mountaineer far beneath her station, doubtless a good man--but practically a stranger, and one to whom she gave her life, and her duty, but not her heart. "We struggled for years to reconcile her, pledging absolute forgiveness, but her blood told, Belle-Ann--the blood of her father--her high-bred spirit met our pleadings with unbroken stoic silence. She lost herself completely--the grand young man who had just been elected to the state senate of Kentucky, and who loved her, declined from that day and died a broken man. The remorse that gnawed at my heart for years, Belle-Ann, has left its scars--is a skein of secret, silent woe, untold, my dear little girl--a blight across the old man's life that no language is sufficiently adequate to reveal. "Bah!--what an awful lesson I have had--and then I found you. You were sent by a kind Providence to assuage my great sorrow, Belle-Ann. You see--my daughter--we wished to be certain that you inherited your mother's lovable traits. I did not wish to take a step which might, perforce, have to be retraced later; to be plain, we sought to make sure that we liked you, and I can say to-night that we do like you, Belle-Ann--we do more than that, we all love you--we do more than love you; we idolize you; we worship you; we all adore you. Will you adopt us? Will you take me with all my arrant failings and use me as best you can for a grandfather?" He dropped his hat on the grass and stood erect before her in the moonlight the image of a southern nobleman, holding his hands out to her. All throughout his earnest words she had been deeply and happily moved. Her bosom rose and fell, riding the roses pinned over her heart. Her star-like eyes were misty, and there was pathos in her sweet treble utterance as she thrust her two hands into his waiting palms. "Col--grandpa," she corrected, "it is a proud distinction to claim you for my grandfather--I feel wholly unworthy. I feet almost like an interloper--I owe you so much--I shall struggle with all my heart to take and fill my mother's place." The Colonel stooped and pressed his lips to her forehead and kissed the curls near the little wreath of flowers. "Belle-Ann," he went on, a new line of serious thought suggested to him, "you must promise me one more thing--in fact, if you don't promise, it will disrupt my plan of years--it will--well--it will place me in a very unhappy position." "What is it, grandpa?" she quizzed through her smiles.