"He didn't, Elizabeth. That is, not knowingly," Captain Spooner explained gently. "When he went away from here he had promised to send money for your keep, and he said he would come back for you. He did send some money, then all at once it ceased, and we never heard from him again. It seems he got word that you were dead. Some movers coming through told him of a baby that had died, and they mixed it up some way. He was sick and down on his luck at the time, and failed to write to us, but he never would have done it if he'd known his daughter was living. Philip Maude wasn't that kind of a man. He was a gentleman, born and bred, and a brave man always."
"O, Father--I love to hear you say that!" said Elizabeth. "I'll always be glad to think of him as brave and kind. But I thought--Cousin Hannah said--wasn't the name Mudd?"
"Mudd? No, indeed. His name was Maude--M-a-u-d-e. A very good name, too. What on earth made you think it was Mudd?"
"Cousin Hannah told me so," sobbed Elizabeth. "And O, now I can tell you when it's all over--I've been so bitterly ashamed and miserable to know that I, who used to really fool myself into thinking I was better than other people, was just a miserable mover's child--and that my name was Mudd!"
"Cousin Hannah always did pronounce it that way," said Mrs. Spooner, "she may have thought it was spelled so--it's too bad to think how you suffered for her mistake." The motherly eyes overflowed, realizing how sensitive Elizabeth, who adored pretty names, must have felt at being saddled with such a grotesquely ugly one.
"So Philip Maude thought his daughter was dead till I showed those pictures. He told me that when he saw the little photograph it was like looking at a picture of his dead wife. He saw how much I loved you, and how proud I was of you, and he had a struggle in his mind to know whether he ought to claim you after all these years; but he had decided that he must give you up when the fight came on, and the decision was taken out of his bands. The reason he sent for me at the last was that he had, a few weeks before he enlisted, got notice of a small inheritance that had fallen to him in England. It won't be more than twenty-five thousand dollars--five thousand pounds, he called it--but he made his will, and gave me his papers so that you might prove your right to it, and he said that you might want to go home to your own people in England. He sent you this ring, and this broken watch chain--the watch itself was shattered by the bullet that gave him his death wound."
Elizabeth took the ring and chain he handed her and wept over them. They seemed to bring the father she had never consciously seen very close to her. It was not as though he took this father's place, but rather as if he were some one among her ancestors, far back, almost in another life.
"I hope I may go there some time," she said at last. "But you and mother are the only father and mother I can ever have--and my home must be here with you."
* * * * *
The Spooners stayed on in the old adobe through the winter. There was little to do at the ranch, and they were really more comfortable where they were. The first installment of Elizabeth's income arrived from England about holiday time, and made things most wonderfully joyous in the Spooner family. It was comical to see how the new state of affairs impressed Maudie Pratt. Grandmother's diamond ring became a small matter indeed compared to the small packet of really excellent old jewelry that was forwarded to Elizabeth. The fact that she added Maude to her name, simply calling herself Elizabeth Maude Spooner, was rather a disappointment. Maudie Pratt, under similar circumstances, would have promptly dropped the Spooner altogether.