overcame his prompting to spare her.

"And yet," he said, after a long pause, in which he seemed to be
assimilating the information she had given him--"and yet I don't see how
that explains _you_."

"I suppose it doesn't--not any more than your situation explains you."

"My situation explains me perfectly, because I'm the victim of a wrong."

"Well, so am I--in another way. I'm made to suffer because I'm the
daughter of my parents."

"That's a rotten shame," he exclaimed, in boyish sympathy "It isn't your
fault."

"Of course it isn't," she smiled, wistfully. "And yet I'd rather suffer
with the parents I have than be happy with any others."

"I suppose that's natural," he admitted, doubtfully.

"I wish I knew more about them," she went on, continuing to give light
touches to the work before her, and now and then leaning back to get the
effect. "I never understood why my father was in prison in Canada."

"Perhaps it was when he killed the man," Ford suggested.

"No; that was in Virginia--at least, the first one. His people didn't like
it. That was the reason for his leaving home. He hated a settled life; and
so he wandered away into the northwest of Canada. It was in the days when