"And do you not even know where this home was?"
"I know nothing of its locality. I was too young to remember the names of persons or places. But I have often fancied it was in Italy."
"In Italy!"
"Yes; for the first home which I really remember was a fisherman's hut, in a little village within a few miles of Naples. I was the only child in that miserable hovel—lonely, desolate, miserable, in the power of two wretches, whose presence filled me with loathing."
"And they were—?"
"An old woman, called Andrinetta—I know that, though I called her 'nurse' when she was with me in the beautiful home I so dimly remember—and the man whom you have heard of under the name of Black Milsom."
"Is he an Italian?" asked Andrew, astonished.
"I don't know," replied Honoria. "In England he calls himself an Englishman—in Italy he is supposed to be an Italian. What his real calling was in those days I do not know; but I feel assured that it must been dark and unlawful as all his actions have been since that time. He pretended to get his living like the other fishermen in the neighbourhood; but he was often idle for a week at a time, and still more often, absent. I have seen him count over gold and jewels with old Andrinetta on his return from some expedition. To me he was harsh and cruel. I hated him, and he knew that I hated him. He ordered me to call him father, and I was more than once savagely beaten by him because I refused to do so. Under such treatment, in such a wretched home, deprived of all natural companionship, I grew wild and strange. My will was indomitable as the will of my tyrant; and on many occasions I resisted him boldly. Sometimes I ran away, and wandered for days together among the neighbouring hills and woods; but I returned always sooner or later to my miserable shelter, for I knew not where else to go. My lonely life had made me shrink from all human creatures, except the two wretches with whom I lived; and when the few neighbours would have shown me some kindness, I ran from them in wild, unreasoning terror."
"Strange!" muttered the police-officer.
"Yes; a strange history, is it not?" returned Lady Eversleigh. "And you wonder, no doubt, to hear of such a childhood from the lips of Sir Oswald Eversleigh's widow. One day I heard a neighbour reproaching the man with his cruel treatment of me. 'It is bad enough to have stolen the child,' he said; 'you shouldn't beat her as well.' From that hour I knew that I was a stolen child. I told him as much one night, and the next morning he took me to Naples, where, in the most obscure and yet most crowded part of the city, I lived for some years. 'Nobody will trouble himself about you here, my young princess,' my tyrant said to me. 'Children swarm by hundreds in all the alleys; you will only be one more drop of water in the ocean.'"