What this was she had no means of guessing, but it was emphatically there.

She had learned, by bitter experience, never to ask to be taken to the fashionable portions of the city; she knew that the sound of a voice speaking English at a neighboring table was enough to cause her father to finish his meal in a hurry and leave the restaurant.

They never went to the British Church, and even such cosmopolitan spots as the aquarium or the museum were equally taboo.
Long and often did Lorna puzzle over this idiosyncrasy of her father.
She retained vague memories of her early childhood, when he had surely been utterly different and would come into the nursery to romp with her.
It had not been altogether her mother's death; that had happened when she was only six years old, and there were bright memories after it of happy times together.

No--it was when she was ten years old that the unknown catastrophe must have occurred which had ruined her father's life.

She could remember plainly the visit of several gentlemen, and of loud angry voices talking inside the drawing-room; she was standing on the stairs as they came out into the hall, and her father had told her roughly to run away.