"We thought it better to lose no time," said Mark.
"You did well, and I thank you for it. I have something of great importance to say to both of you—something which ought to have been told years ago. You, perhaps, can almost guess it."
Mark nodded, while his wife sighed deeply.
"Twenty years ago," continued the earl, "I was a young man, gay, popular, fond of life, an officer in the army, and the younger son of a noble family, but poor. You do not know how poor a man of fashion can be. I was very popular—every house in London was open to me—but I knew that I was sought for my good spirits and genial ways. As for marriage—well, it was useless to think of it, unless I could marry some wealthy heiress."
He paused for a few minutes, and Mark shook his head sadly, as though he would say it was indeed a wretched state of things.
"I speak to you quite frankly," said the earl. "It might be possible to gloss over my follies, and give them kindly names—to say they were but youthful follies, no worse than those of other young men: I might say that I sowed my wild oats; but I come of a truthful race, and I say I was no better—not one-half as good, in fact, as I ought to have been. Then, as a climax to my other follies, I fell in love, and persuaded the young girl I loved to marry me privately. That was bad enough, but I did worse. When we had been a short time married, we quarreled. Neither would give in, and we parted. It matters little to my story who my wife was, whether above or below me in station, whether poor or rich—suffice it to say that we parted.
"Some time after I left England a little daughter was born to her. She still kept her secret. This little child she confided to the care of a servant. The servant must have known you or heard of you, for she left the little one, as you both know, at your door, and you took her in. They wrote to me and told me what they had done, far away in India. I was helpless to interfere. Then I lost my wife; but the child continued with you. I made no effort to reclaim her. I do not seek to gloss over my fault, believe me. The truth is, to a soldier in India a baby is not a very desirable object. The existence of this child was a source of embarrassment and confusion to me. I had not the means of supporting it as a daughter of the house of Studleigh should be supported, so I did what seems so fatally easy, yet always leads to bad consequences—I let circumstances drift along as they would. The end of it was that as years went on I almost forgot the child's existence."
"But the money," said Mark, wonderingly, "always came the same."
The earl looked up quickly.
"Yes—oh—of course that was attended to," he said; but his face flushed and his eyes fell.