She paused a moment.  The girl held the cup of wine to her lips.  A few swallows revived her, and enabled her to go on.

“There were two brothers, James and Stephen Dane.  James, the elder by six years, was my husband and your father.  We lived in the old Dane homestead—­we three—­a happy and prosperous household.  We needed but your coming, my daughter, to fill our cup of joy to the very brim.  No woman in all broad England was a happier wife and mother than Miriam Dane when you were laid upon my breast.

“We named our baby-girl Miriam—­your father would have it so—­and you grew healthful and beautiful, fair and blue-eyed, as it is in the nature of the Danes to be.  I was glad you had not my black eyes and gypsy skin.  I think I loved you all the more because you were your father’s image.

“Ah, Mollie, I never can tell you what a blessed, peaceful household we were until you were three months old!  Then the first change took place—­Stephen Dane got married.

“At Wortley Manor, just without the confines of Steeple Hill, lived Sir John Wortley and his lady.  They had come to spend the hot months down in the country, and my lady had brought with her a London lady’s-maid, full of London airs and graces, styles and fashions.  She was a pretty girl, this buxom Mary Linton, with flaxen curls, and light blue eyes, and a skin white as milk and soft as satin.  She could sing like an angel, and dance like a fairy, and dress and talk like my lady herself.

“Of course, before she had been a month in the place, she had turned the heads of all the young fellows in the village, Stephen Dane’s among the rest.  But while she coquetted with all, she smiled most sweetly on Stephen, with his three hundred pounds laid by in bank, his broad shoulders, his lofty stature and his hearty looks.  Three months after she came to Wortley Manor, she was Stephen Dane’s wife.

“That marriage was the beginning of all the trouble, Mollie.  They left the farm, this young pair, and set up a public-house.  A public suited Mary Dane to the life.  She flaunted in gay dresses and bright ribbons, and gossiped over the bar with the customers, and had all the news of the place put at her tongue’s end.  And Stephen, he took to drink—­a little, at first, to be jovial with the customers; more and more gradually, until, at the end of the honey-moon, he was half his time on the fuddle.  And Mary Dane didn’t care.  She laughed in her pretty way when people talked.

“‘Let him take his glass, Mariam,’ says she to me.  ’He’s fonder of me in his cups, and better-natured every way, than when he’s sober.  As long as my man doesn’t beat me and pull the house about our heads, I’ll never say him nay.’

“It was near the end of the second month that a sick traveler stopped at the Wortley Arms—­so they called the inn—­and lay very ill there for weeks and weeks.  He had taken cold and got a fever, and he was very poorly and like to die.  Mary Dane, with all her airy ways, had a tender heart and a soft head, and she turned to and nursed the sick man like a sister.  They took such care of him at the Wortley Arms that he got well, and in three weeks was able to be up and about.