"Belle-Ann," Colonel Tennytown began gently, with a strange new exultation noticeable in his tones, "I have come to ask you to do me a favor--a very great kindness--do you deem me deserving of a kindness in view of my grim shortcomings?"
"Isn't it singular, Colonel Tennytown," interjected Belle-Ann laughingly, "that when I saw you coming down thah, I thought how happy I'd be if I had the power to do you-all some kindness?"
"Ah!" rejoined the Colonel, "now we have it--happily, you possess a naturally charitable spirit, Belle-Ann," he said. He had never called her Belle-Ann before. His Southern chivalry had never permitted him to diverge from the prefix of Miss to her surname. "As you now know all, Belle-Ann," he continued, "I wish you, henceforth and onward, to call me grandfather--I beg you to forgive me for my seeming tardiness in coming to the front to acknowledge my granddaughter--my approach has doubtless appeared to you masked in a form of deception, and now that I am here to inflict the brazen audacity of a complete confession, you can plainly see, Belle-Ann, that I am in need of your uttermost indulgence. The truth is, I regret to say, that we never knew of your existence until you came here to school when my esteemed friend, Reverend Peterson, made me acquainted with the fact.
"Then, the moment I laid eyes on you my heart melted and my soul went out to you--I instantly saw in you purity and beauty--indeed you are even more beautiful than your mother was, Belle-Ann--your mother whose sole offense was her stubborn refusal to marry the man whom we thought best fitted for her; and then she ran away and married a mountaineer far beneath her station, doubtless a good man--but practically a stranger, and one to whom she gave her life, and her duty, but not her heart.
"We struggled for years to reconcile her, pledging absolute forgiveness, but her blood told, Belle-Ann--the blood of her father--her high-bred spirit met our pleadings with unbroken stoic silence. She lost herself completely--the grand young man who had just been elected to the state senate of Kentucky, and who loved her, declined from that day and died a broken man. The remorse that gnawed at my heart for years, Belle-Ann, has left its scars--is a skein of secret, silent woe, untold, my dear little girl--a blight across the old man's life that no language is sufficiently adequate to reveal.