"Yes, he was very hard; but Heaven punished him!" said William Kelso. "The heir died in a few years, and the second son came home from the army to take his place. He married late in life, and his beautiful, delicate wife bore him two sons, and then died. Her husband was drowned a year later on Lake Como. His two boys inherited their mother's consumptive tendency, and one died in early boyhood, and the other just before he attained his majority. Lord Ivon's house was left unto him desolate." Flower sighed, and he continued: "There was no one to inherit the title and estates unless John Forrest had survived his brothers, or had married and left descendants. So the letters that had been flung aside at last were opened eagerly to discover John Forrest's whereabouts. There were scores of them, for he had never ceased to implore his parents for their forgiveness. He wrote that he was here in the South, that he had married a lovely girl, then that he had a lovely child called Daisy." "My mother!" Flower exclaimed, sadly. "Yes, your mother!" said Mr. Kelso. He paused a moment, watching the long shadows of sunset as they began to creep across the grave-stones in the old cemetery; then he resumed: "After the letter that told of Daisy Forrest's birth, no more came to Lord Ivon, and he supposed that his son had grown tired of writing, and had reconciled himself to the alienation. Alas! poor John was dead." "Dead!" exclaimed Flower. "Yes, although his father knows it not yet," said Mr. Kelso. "You remember all this was thirty-seven years ago, Miss Fielding. Well, to resume my story, Lord Ivon's heart turned to his younger son when all his other descendants were gone, and he came to me, his lawyer, and begged me to cross the ocean and seek an heir to Ivon." "Alas!" sighed Flower, thinking of the little dead baby she had kissed and left in Poky's arms. Had it lived--her lovely little child--it would have been heir to one of the finest titles and estates in old England. "So I came to this place," continued Mr. Kelso. "I have been here little more than a week, but I have had no trouble in tracing John Forrest, for many of the old people in the country about here remember him well. It seems he had poor luck, or perhaps his training as a rich man's son had not fitted him to encounter the hardships of life. He drifted down here from New York, and obtained employment as an overseer on a farm. Soon after he married the farmer's only child, a sweet girl named Mary. A year after Daisy was born, and her father died soon afterward with malarial fever. His wife survived until her daughter was ten years old, and, dying, left her to take care of her farmer grandparents. They died when Daisy was seventeen, and the farm was sold to satisfy a mortgage, and the beautiful granddaughter was thrown upon the world, helpless and penniless. She went into a grand family as a nursery governess, met Charley Fielding, and--the rest you know."