Madaline was a lovely child.  She had a beautiful head and face, and a figure exquisitely molded.  Her smiles were like sunshine; her hair had in it threads of gold; her eyes were of the deep blue that one sees in summer.  It was not only her great loveliness, but there was about her a wonderful charm, a fascination, that no one could resist.

Dr. Letsom loved the child.  She sat on his knee and talked to him, until the whole face of the earth seemed changed to him.  Besides his great love for the little Madaline, he became interested in the story of Margaret Dornham’s life—­in her love for the handsome, reckless ne’er-do-well who had given up work as a failure—­in her wonderful patience, for she never complained—­in her sublime heroism, for she bore all as a martyr.  He heard how Henry Dornham was often seen intoxicated—­heard that he was abusive, violent.  He went afterward to the cottage, and saw bruises on his wife’s delicate arms and hands—­dark cruel marks on her face; but by neither word nor look did she ever betray her husband.  Watching that silent, heroic life, he became interested in her.  More than once he tried to speak to her about her husband—­to see if anything could be done to reclaim him.  She knew that all efforts were in vain—­there was no good in him; still more she knew now that there never had been such good as she had hoped and believed.  Another thing pleased and interested the doctor—­it was Margaret Dornham’s passionate love for her foster child.  All the love that she would have lavished on her husband, all the love that she would have given to her own child, all the repressed affection and buried tenderness of heart were given to this little one.  It was touching pitiful, sad, to see how she worshiped her.

“What shall I do when the three years are over, and her father comes to claim her?” she would say to the doctor.  “I shall never be able to part with her.  Sometimes I think I shall run away with her and hide her.”

How little she dreamed that there was a prophecy in the words!

“Her father has the first claim,” said Dr. Letsom.  “It may be hard for us to lose her, but she belongs to him.”

“He will never love her as I do,” observed Margaret Dornham.

Of the real rank and position of that father she had not the faintest suspicion.  He had money, she knew; but that was all she knew—­and money to a woman whose heart hungers for love seems very little.

“There is something almost terrible in the love of that woman for that child,” thought the doctor.  “She is good, earnest, tender, true, by nature; but she is capable of anything for the little one’s sake.”

So the two years and a half passed, and the child, with her delicate, marvelous grace, had become the very light of those two lonely lives.  In another six months they would have to lose her.  Dr. Letsom knew very well that if the earl were still living at the end of the three years his son would tell him of his marriage.