"Father, oh, father! Do you think I listened to those words tamely? I said: 'My father is the best man in all the world.' Lady Mary looked at me; at first she was angry, then a softened expression came over her face. She said: 'You poor little girl!' and then she said: 'Have you never suspected why he married Lady Helen Dalrymple?' Oh, father, it was after those words I came here, for I was determined to find out, and to-day--oh, my own Daddy, I did find out! I asked Aunt Penelope." "She told you--my God! she told you!" "She did, but I don't believe it--it isn't true." "Give me your hand, Heather." I gave it. I had some little difficulty in doing so, for a cold, icy, terrible doubt was flooding my mind, flooding my reason, flooding my powers of thought. "Keep it up," said my father to me. "Be brave, right on to the end. Tell me what she said. You are my daughter and--once I was a soldier; tell your soldier father what she said." "Oh, Daddy, Daddy, she said that you, you, my father--had--oh, it's so awful!--that you were arrested in India on a charge of forgery--you had made away with a lot of money--you were cashiered from the army and--you were imprisoned. All the time while I was picturing you a brave soldier, filling your post with distinction and pride, you were only--only--in prison! Oh, Daddy, it isn't true--it could not have been true; she said it was true, she said that your term was over last autumn, and that you came straight here to see me, and that, in some extraordinary way, you had money, and you carried everything off with a high hand, and insisted on taking me away with you, and the next thing she heard was that you had married Lady Helen Dalrymple. She says, Daddy, that you will never outlive your disgrace, and there isn't a soldier in the length and breadth of the land who will speak to you!" I laid my head down on his coat sleeve. Sobs rent my frame. There was an absolute silence on his part. He did not interrupt my tears for a moment, nor did he say one single word of contradiction. After a minute or so he remarked, very quietly: "Now, you will stop crying and listen." I sat upright. I looked at him out of glassy eyes; he gazed straight back at me; there was not a scrap of shame about his face; I wondered very much at that, and then a wild, joyful thought visited me. He could clear himself, he could show me that this disgraceful story was all a lie. "Now, stop crying," he said again. "Whatever I did or did not do, I was a soldier and fought the Queen's battles when she was alive--God bless her!--and I was accounted a brave man." "You were never a forger--you never saw the inside of a prison?" "Those are your two charges against me, Heather?" "Not mine, not mine," I said; "I just want you to tell me the truth." "Well, as a matter of fact, I was accused of forgery." My eyes fell, I trembled all over.