tall
sunny-haired girl, with Alan's own smile and Alan's own eyes,--he
grew suddenly aware of an unexpected interest. The sun went back on
the dial of his life for thirty years or thereabouts, and Alan
himself seemed to stand before him. Alan, as he used to burst in for
his holidays from Winchester! After all, this pink rosebud was his
eldest son's only daughter.

Chestnut hair, pearly teeth, she was Alan all over.

Sir Anthony bowed his most respectful bow, with old-fashioned
courtesy.

"And what can I do for you, young lady?" he asked in his best
professional manner.

"Grandfather," the girl broke out, blushing red to the ears, but
saying it out none the less; "Grandfather, I'm your granddaughter,
Dolores Barton."

The old man bowed once more, a most deferential bow. Strange to
say, when he saw her, this claim of blood pleased him.

"So I see, my child," he answered. "And what do you want with me?"

"I only knew it last night," Dolly went on, casting down those blue
eyes in her shamefaced embarrassment. "And this morning . . . I've
come to implore your protection."

"That's prompt," the old man replied, with a curious smile, half
suspicious, half satisfied. "From whom, my little one?" And his
hand caressed her shoulder.

"From my mother," Dolly answered, blushing still deeper crimson.
"From the mother who put this injustice upon me. From the mother
who, by her own confession, might have given me an honorable
birthright, like any one else's, and who cruelly refused to."

The old man eyed her with a searching glance.

"Then she hasn't brought you up in her own wild ideas?" he said.
"She hasn't dinged them into you!"

"She has tried to," Dolly answered. "But I will have nothing to do
with them. I hate her ideas, and her friends, and her faction."

Sir Anthony drew her forward and gave her a sudden kiss. Her
spirit pleased him.

"That's well, my child," he answered. "That's well--for a
beginning."

Then Dolly, emboldened by his kindness,--for in a moment, somehow,
she had taken her grandfather's heart by assault,--began to tell
him how it had all come about; how she had received an offer from a
most excellent young man at Combe Mary in Dorsetshire,--very well
connected, the squire of his parish; how she had accepted him with
joy; how she loved him dearly; how this shadow intervened; how
thereupon, for the first time, she had asked for and learned the
horrid truth about her parentage; how sh