He had picked up with and eventually married a 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.