Chapter 22 - Page 2

might have given me an honorable
birthright, like any one else's, and who cruelly refused to."

The old man eyed her with a searching glance.

"Then she hasn't brought you up in her own wild ideas?" he said.
"She hasn't dinged them into you!"

"She has tried to," Dolly answered. "But I will have nothing to do
with them. I hate her ideas, and her friends, and her faction."

Sir Anthony drew her forward and gave her a sudden kiss. Her
spirit pleased him.

"That's well, my child," he answered. "That's well--for a
beginning."

Then Dolly, emboldened by his kindness,--for in a moment, somehow,
she had taken her grandfather's heart by assault,--began to tell
him how it had all come about; how she had received an offer from a
most excellent young man at Combe Mary in Dorsetshire,--very well
connected, the squire of his parish; how she had accepted him with
joy; how she loved him dearly; how this shadow intervened; how
thereupon, for the first time, she had asked for and learned the
horrid truth about her parentage; how she was stunned and appalled
by it; how she could never again live under one roof with such a
woman; and how she came to him for advice, for encouragement, for
assistance. She flung herself on his mercy. Every word she spoke
impressed Sir Anthony. This was no mere acting; the girl really
meant it. Brought up in those hateful surroundings, innate purity
of mind had preserved her innocent heart from the contagion of
example. She spoke like a sensible, modest, healthy English
maiden. She was indeed a granddaughter any man might be proud of.
'Twas clear as the sun in the London sky to Sir Anthony that she
recoiled with horror from her mother's position. He sympathized
with her and pitied her. Dolores, all blushes, lifted her eyelids
and looked at him. Her grandfather drew her towards him with a
smile of real tenderness, and, unbending as none had seen him
unbend before since Alan's death, told her all the sad history as
he himself envisaged it. Dolores listened and shuddered. The old
man was vanquished. He would have taken her once to himself, he
said, if Herminia had permitted it; he would take her to himself
now, if Dolores would come to him.

As for Dolly, she lay sobbing and crying in Sir Anthony's arms, as
though she had always known him. After all, he was her grandfather.
Nearer to her in heart and soul than her mother. And the butler
could hardly conceal his surprise and amazement when three minutes
later Sir Anthony rang the bell, and being discovered alone with a
strange young lady in tears, made the unprecedented announcement
that he would see no patients at all that morning, and was at