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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
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