“I shall elope some day—­see if I don’t,” she said to Peter, who still remained in the family, and was her confidant in most things.  “I shall say ‘yes’ to the first man who proposes, and leave this prison for the world, and the grand sights which Adolph says are everywhere.  Here I am, cooped up with no young society, and seldom allowed to attend a picnic, or party, or concert, and I do so enjoy the latter, only I often feel as if I could do better than the professionals.  Adolph says I can, and he knows.”

Adolph Candida was her music teacher, who, alone of the young men in Crompton, had free access to the house.  He was a fine fellow as well as teacher, and had done much to develop Dora’s taste and love for music, which had strengthened with her years, until her voice was wonderful for its scope and sweetness.  Naturally there sprang up between the young people an affection which ripened into love, and Candida was told by Eudora to ask her father’s sanction to their marriage.  That she could stoop to care for her music teacher the Colonel never dreamed, and was speechless with surprise and anger when asked by the young Italian for her hand.  To show him the door was the work of a moment, and then Dora was sent for.  She came at once, with a look in her eyes which made the Colonel hesitate a little before he told her what he had done, and what he expected her to do.

“If you disobey me in the slightest, you are no longer a daughter of my house,” he said, in the cold, hard tone which Dora knew so well, and had feared so much.

But the fear was over now.  Something had transformed the timid girl into a woman, with a courage equal to the Colonel’s.  For a time she stood perfectly still, with her eyes fixed upon the angry man, listening to him until he spoke of her as the daughter of the house; then, with a gesture of her hands, which bade him stop, she exclaimed, “I did not know I was daughter of anything.  For fifteen years I have lived here, and though you have been kind to me in your way, you have surrounded yourself with an air of reserve so cold and impregnable that I have never dared ask you who I am, since I was a child, and asked you about my mother.  You told me then never to mention that subject again, and I never have.  But do you think I have forgotten that I had a mother?  I have not.  I do forget some things in a strange way.  They come in a moment and go, and I cannot bring them back, but the face I think was mother’s is not one of them.  Of my father I remember nothing.  I have been told that when you brought me here you said he was a scoundrel!  Are you he?  Are you my father?”

The Colonel was white as a sheet, and his lips twitched nervously, as if it were hard for them to frame the word No, which came at last decidedly.  Over Dora’s face a look of disappointment passed, and her hands grasped the back of a chair in front of her, as if she needed support.

“If you are not my father, who and what was my mother?” was her next question, and the Colonel replied, “She was an honest woman.  Be satisfied with that.”