Spanish pantomime girl up London way, so Mrs. Peck's information went,
and Maria had been the child of their union.

No one called her Maria. Her mother had named her Columbine, and
Columbine she had become to all who knew her. Her mother dying when she
was only three, Columbine had been left to the sole care of her wastrel
father. And he, then a skipper of a small cargo steamer plying across
the North Sea, had placed her in the charge of a spinster aunt who kept
an infants' school in a little Kentish village near the coast. Here, up
to the age of seventeen, Columbine had lived and been educated; but the
old schoolmistress had worn out at last, and on her death-bed had sent
for Mrs. Peck, as being the girl's only remaining relative, her father
having drifted out of her ken long since.

Mrs. Peck had nobly risen to the occasion. She had no daughter of her
own; she could do with a daughter. But when she saw Columbine she sucked
up her breath.

"My, but she'll be a care!" was her verdict.

"She don't know--how lovely she is," the dying woman had whispered.
"Don't tell her!"

And Mrs. Peck had staunchly promised to keep the secret, so far as lay
in her power.

That had happened six months before, and Columbine was out of mourning
now. She had come into the Spear Point community like a shy bird, a
little slip of a thing, upright as a dart, with a fashion of holding her
head that kept all familiarity at bay. But the shyness had all gone now.