Well, when the seven years were up, your relations and mine too, Ernestine, concocted what I have always considered an ill-begotten and a miserably selfish plot.

Your father, unfortunately, yielded to them, for your sake.

You were told that he had died in prison.

He did not.

He lived through his seven years there, and when he came out did so in another name and went abroad on the morning of the day of his liberation." "Good God!" she cried.