"'We have not been happy together, dear,' he said, 'but I do not think it has been my fault. I loved you always, but it was hard to make you believe it; be good to our child, Bianca, for my sake.' And then, as she knelt beside him in speechless anguish and remorse, he called his little Crystal to him and kissed and blessed me, and while he was still holding my hand a sudden spasm crossed his face and he put his head down upon her shoulder, and in another moment he was gone. "My poor mother, she did not long survive him. "As soon as the news of my father's death reached England, Uncle Rolf wrote at once offering a home to his only brother's widow and child. "It was my father's desire, she knew, that she should live under the protection of his relatives, so she obeyed his wishes at once. She did not hesitate for a moment, though she felt she was a dying woman, and it broke her heart to leave her husband's grave. She would bring her child to England and place her safely in Colonel Ferrers's care, and then she could go with an easy conscience to rejoin her beloved. "How well I remember that journey; every detail was stamped upon my childish recollection. "Alas! she never lived to reach England. She was taken very ill in Paris, and after a few days of intense suffering, she passed peacefully away. "A kind-hearted American widow and her daughter, with whom my father had a slight acquaintance in Florence, had traveled with us and were at the same hotel, and nothing could exceed their goodness to my poor mother. "They nursed her most tenderly, and were with her when she died, and Mrs. Stanforth promised my mother most faithfully that they would watch over me until they had seen me safe under Colonel Ferrers's care. "Every one was kind to me. I remember once when I was sitting in a corner of the saloon with Minnie Stanforth, I heard people talking softly of the beautiful Florentine lady who lay dead upstairs, and how some one had told them that she had died of a broken heart from the loss of her English husband. "I was not with her when she breathed her last. Minnie had coaxed me away on some pretext or other, and when I became restless and miserable, she took me in her kind arms, and with the tears streaming from her eyes, told the truth. "Fern, sometimes when I shut my eyes I can recall that scene now. "I can see a child crouching in a corner of the big gaudy salon where a parrot was screaming in a gilded cage, a forlorn miserable child, with her face hidden in her hands and crying as though her little heart would break.