sereene was seven years old his mother died. When he was
seventeen his father had the imprudence to run away with the favorite
daughter of a rich man,--which crime was never forgiven. Had there been
the slightest excuse for her conduct it might have been otherwise, but
in the eyes of her world there was none. That an Amherst of Herst Royal
should be guilty of such a plebeian trick as "falling passionately in
love" was bad enough, but to have her bestow that love upon a man at
least eighteen years her senior, an Irishman, a mere engineer, with no
money to speak of, with nothing on earth to recommend him beyond a
handsome face, a charming manner, and a heart too warm ever to grow
old, was not to be tolerated for a moment. And Eleanor Amherst, from
the hour of her elopement, was virtually shrouded and laid within her
grave so far as her own family was concerned.

Not that they need have hurried over her requiem, as the poor soul was
practically laid there in the fourth year of her happy married life,
dying of the same fever that had carried off her husband two days
before, and leaving her three-year-old daughter in the care of her
step-son.

At twenty-one, therefore, John Massereene found himself alone in the
world, with about three hundred pounds a year and a small, tearful,
clinging, forlorn child. Having followed his father's profession, more
from a desire to gratify that father than from direct inclination, he
found, when too late, that he neither liked it nor did it like him. He
had, as he believed, a talent for farming; so that when, on the death
of a distant relation, he found himself, when all was told, the
possessor of seven hundred pounds a year, he bought Brooklyn, a modest
place in one of the English shires, married his first love, and carried
her and Molly home to it.

Once or twice in the early part of her life he had made an appeal to
old Mr. Amherst, Molly's grandfather, on her behalf,--more from a sense
of duty owing to her than from any desire to rid himself of the child,
who had, indeed, with her pretty, coaxing ways, made a very cozy nest
for herself in the deepest recesses of his large heart. But all such
appeals had been unavailing. So that Molly had grown from baby to
child, from child to girl, without having so much as seen her nearest
relations, although Herst Royal was situated in the very county next to
hers.

Even now, in spite of her having attained her eighteenth year, this
ostracism is a