"Oh, Daddy, Daddy, she said that you, you, my father—had—oh, it's so awful!—that you were arrested in India on a charge of forgery—you had made away with a lot of money—you were cashiered from the army and—you were imprisoned. All the time while I was picturing you a brave soldier, filling your post with distinction and pride, you were only—only—in prison! Oh, Daddy, it isn't true—it could not have been true; she said it was true, she said that your term was over last autumn, and that you came straight here to see me, and that, in some extraordinary way, you had money, and you carried everything off with a high hand, and insisted on taking me away with you, and the next thing she heard was that you had married Lady Helen Dalrymple. She says, Daddy, that you will never outlive your disgrace, and there isn't a soldier in the length and breadth of the land who will speak to you!"
I laid my head down on his coat sleeve. Sobs rent my frame. There was an absolute silence on his part. He did not interrupt my tears for a moment, nor did he say one single word of contradiction. After a minute or so he remarked, very quietly:
"Now, you will stop crying and listen."
I sat upright. I looked at him out of glassy eyes; he gazed straight back at me; there was not a scrap of shame about his face; I wondered very much at that, and then a wild, joyful thought visited me. He could clear himself, he could show me that this disgraceful story was all a lie.
"Now, stop crying," he said again. "Whatever I did or did not do, I was a soldier and fought the Queen's battles when she was alive—God bless her!—and I was accounted a brave man."
"You were never a forger—you never saw the inside of a prison?"
"Those are your two charges against me, Heather?"
"Not mine, not mine," I said; "I just want you to tell me the truth."
"Well, as a matter of fact, I was accused of forgery."
My eyes fell, I trembled all over.