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had unwarrantably deceived him in the year 1861, causing him to lose a considerable sum. He said they were all the same and he wouldn’t let ’em come within three mile of him, dam scoundrels! He never allowed his household to speak of them.

Therefore his daughter Adelaide, being young and wildly romantic, promptly fell in love with the first Frenchman she had ever seen, the undesirable but good-looking Gaston Ste. Croix. She met him while she was staying at a country house, and she ran away with him. Lord Trent swore she was dead to him, dead to him, sir! Damme, he'd rather see a daughter of his in her coffin—she had better not attempt to see him again . . .

Perhaps if she had been a little wiser, or a little less proud, she would have known that his anger was partly assumed. But she never did try to see him or to communicate at all. She knew him very well, foolish as she was. He was a hot-tempered and unreasonable old man.

If it had not been for that fact, the small Antoine might have had some clear knowledge of his grandfather and his family; and of the old house at Trent Stoke; and of the little orphan half-cousin, who, as things were, stood to inherit the house and the title and everything pertaining to it—Pamela Learmonth, five years old, the child of Lord Trent’s daughter by his second wife. And Lord Trent, on his side, might have been aware of the continued existence of his grandson Antoine-Hugues-Phillipe-Ste. Croix. As it was, his elder daughter not having been heard of for ten years, Lord Trent, in the casual manner that he combined with an unusual rigidity of prejudice, presumed her dead, and Pamela Trent heir to the Trent barony, which descended in the female line. Not that he or anyone else worried much about it, for he was obviously going to live for another twenty years.

Ste. Croix had married Lord Trent’s elder daughter solely for her money and her position, knowing that the title was