“I thought so,” returned his companion, quietly.

“Did you?” asked the young man, looking surprised.  “I compliment you upon your penetration then, for I have passed for one of your countrymen almost everywhere since coming to this country.”

“I think you are an Englishman,” said Mr. Abbot.

“I am, sir.  I have an estate called Heathdale in the county of Hampshire, England.  I own another in Surrey.  Mr. Abbot, I am an English baronet, and I have simply been a visitor and traveler in this country during the last year.”

“You, an English baronet!” exclaimed Mr. Abbot, excitedly, a vivid flush suffusing his face, then quickly receding, leaving him deadly pale.

“Yes, sir; but, pray believe me, I had no intention of boasting of either my wealth or title,” observed the young man modestly.

“Oh!” sighed the sick man.  “I am afraid then that you can never marry Virgie.”

“Sir!  Why not?  What is there in what I have told you to debar me from making your daughter my wife?  I should suppose you would feel that I have it in my power to make her all the happier on account of it.”

“But you do not know, you cannot understand, you English are so proud, so tenacious of honor and caste.  Ah, my poor child!” Mr. Abbot cried, incoherently, and appearing greatly agitated and distressed.

“I am sure, my friend, I cannot comprehend this excessive emotion,” Sir William—­as we shall call him henceforth—­remarked.

“Would you be willing to marry a woman whose name is irretrievably linked with disgrace?” Mr. Abbot asked, while cold perspiration started out upon his forehead, and his face was almost convulsed with his anguish of mind.

He knew that Virgie had grown to love this man.  He was conscious of the pride and prejudices of the English aristocracy, and he believed that when he should tell the story of his life, as he knew it was only right he should do, Sir William Heath would no longer care to make his daughter his wife, and her heart would be broken.

Sir William looked up, startled at this question, his own face paling suddenly.

“Surely, Mr. Abbot, you cannot mean anything so bad as that,” he replied, in a low, pained tone.

“I will tell you all about it,” said the sick man, “and then you must decide for yourself whether you are still willing to wed the daughter of a dishonored man.  Of course you have seen from the beginning of your acquaintance with us that no pleasure or profit that might accrue to us from this kind of a life could ever reconcile us to it; that only some terrible misfortune could have driven me and my beautiful darling into such a wild and desolate region as this.”

“Yes; I have felt that there was something mysterious in your being here—­some secret reason why you should have shut yourselves away from all comfort and civilization,” Sir William admitted, as his companion paused for strength to go on.  “But I have never attributed it to any willful wrong on your part.”