"Dorothy!" again he turned upon her that strange eager glance. "That lady's name was Dorothy!" and he looked up at the picture with a sigh. "She was the best of women. My dear and honoured mother—the Lady Dorothy Granville. Who are your parents? Who in this neighbourhood bears such an odd name as Chance?"
"No one, my lord, saving myself, and I come by it oddly enough. I am the child of whom your lordship may have heard, who farmer Rushmere found upon the heath fifteen years ago, clinging to the bosom of her dead mother, who, it was supposed, perished during the night in a fearful storm. I could only just speak a few broken words, and could tell nothing about my poor mother, only that she called me her Dolly; so the good farmer had me christened Dorothy Chance, to signify that I came to him by chance. His wife adopted me as her daughter, and I have lived with them ever since."
Lord Wilton listened with breathless attention. "Did your foster parents ever find out who your mother was?"
"She was a stranger in these parts, no one had ever seen her before."
"Was there anything on her person, or in her appearance by which she could be identified."
"Nothing, my lord. Father has often told me that she must have been very poor; that he never saw a body so wasted by starvation and misery. Her clothing was very scanty and ragged, and composed of the coarsest materials, begged, he supposed, from some poor creature, not quite so destitute as herself. She was very young, and he thought, at one time, must have been very pretty. He cut off a lock of her hair—I have it here, my lord," and Dorothy took from her neck a black ribbon, to which was suspended a large old-fashioned silver locket, and put it into Lord Wilton's hand. It contained a thick tress of golden brown hair.
He took the sad memento, all that remained to the poor girl of her mother, with a trembling hand, and went to the window to examine it.
Over his pale face a more deadly pallor stole. He looked at it with a long earnest gaze, then returned it with a deep sigh to the wondering girl.
"And this is all."