s ago and called him father, till he said he was
not my father. I never told you of him, or that this was once my home,
although I described the place to you as something I had seen. If he
were not my father I did not want to know who was, and did not want to
talk about it, and after I married Mr. Smith it was very dreadful. He
hated the Colonel when he found he could not get money from him, and
sometimes taunted me with my birth, saying I was a Harris and a Cracker;
but the cruelest of all was telling me you were dead. Why did he do it?"

"I think your fretting for me irritated him, and he feared you might
never sing again unless he sent for me, and he did not want me," Eloise
said. "He never wanted me. He was a bad man, and I could not feel sorry
when he died."

"You needn't," Amy exclaimed excitedly, and, getting up she began to
walk the floor as she continued, "It is time things were cleared up. I
am not afraid of him now, although I was when he was living. He broke
all the spirit I had, till the sound of his voice when he was angry made
me shake. Thank God he was not your father! there has been a lie all the
time, and that wore upon me. Your father,--Adolph Candida,--is lying in
the Protestant burying-ground in Rome."

Grasping her mother's arm Eloise cried, "Oh, mother, what is this you
are saying, and why have I never heard it before?"

Amy had been tolerably clear in her conversation up to this point, but
she was getting tired, and it was a long, rambling story she told, with
many digressions and much irrelevant matter, but Eloise managed to
follow her and get a fairly correct version of the truth. Candida, whom
Amy loved devotedly, and with whom she had been very happy, had died
after a brief illness when Eloise was an infant. Homer Smith, the
handsome American, who had attached himself to the Candidas, was very
kind to the young widow, whom he induced to marry him, and to let her
little girl take his name.

"I don't know why I did that," Amy said; "only he always made me do what
he pleased, and he pretended to love you so much, and he didn't want his
friends to know he was my second husband when he came to America. I
couldn't understand that, but I yielded, as I did in everything. He
seemed to hate the name of Candida, and was jealous of him in his
grave, and would never let me speak of him. I think he was crazy, and
he said I was, and shut me up. He once wrote to Col. Crompton for money
and got a dreadfu