“Things had gone badly with me.  I had been able to take no lodgers, while they were with me.  I had got into debt, and even could I have cleared myself, I could not well have kept the house on, without a woman to look after it.  I was restless, too, and longed to be moving about.  So I sold off the furniture, paid my debts, and laid by the money that remained, for the child’s use in the future.

“I had, some time before, met an old comrade travelling the country with a show.  I happened to meet him again, just as I was leaving, and he told me the name of a man, in London, who sold such things.  I left the child, for a year, with some people I knew, a few miles out of Southampton; came up to London, bought a show, and started.  It was lonely work, at first; but, after a year, I fetched the child away, and took her round the country with me, and for four years had a happy time of it.

“I had chosen this part of the country, and, after a time, I became uneasy in my mind, as to whether I was doing right; and whether, for the child’s sake, I ought not to tell you that she was alive, and offer to give her up, if you were willing to take her.  I heard how your son’s death had changed you, and thought that, maybe, you would like to take his daughter; but, before bringing her to you, I thought she should have a better education than I had time to give her, and that she should be placed with a lady, so that, if you took her, you need not be ashamed of her manners.

“I hoped you would not take her.  I wanted to keep her for myself; but my duty to her was clear.

“And now, squire, you know all about it.  I have been wrong to keep her so long from you, I grant; but I can only say that I have done my duty, as far as I could, and that, though I have made many mistakes, my conscience is clear, that I did the best, as far as it seemed to me at the time.”

Chapter 5:  A Quiet Time.

As the sergeant was telling the story, the squire had sat with his face shaded by his hand, but more than one tear had dropped heavily on the table.

“I wish I could say as much,” he said sadly, when the other ended.  “I wish that I could say that my conscience is clear, Mr. Wilks.  I have misjudged you cruelly, and that without a tithe of the reason, which you had, for thinking me utterly heartless and cruel.  You will have heard that I never got those letters my son wrote me, after he was ill, and that, when I returned home and received them, I posted to Southampton, only to find that I was too late; and that, for a year, I did all in my power to find the child.  Still, all this is no excuse.  I refused to forgive him, returned his letters unanswered, and left him, as it seemed, to his fate.

“It is no excuse to say that I had made up my mind to forgive him, when he was, as I thought, sufficiently punished.  He did not know that.  As to the poverty in which you found him, I can only plead that I did not dream that he would come to that.  He had, I knew, some money, for I had just sent him his half-year’s allowance before he wrote to me about this business.  Then there was the furniture of his rooms in London, his horses, jewels, and other matters.  I had thought he could go on very well for a year.