This was the situation of Mr. Dacre. The whole of his large property was
entailed, and descended to his nephew, who was a Protestant; and yet,
when he looked upon the blooming face of his enchanting daughter, he
blessed the Providence which, after all his visitations, had doomed him
to be the sire of a thing so lovely. An exile from her country at an
early age, the education of May Dacre had been completed in a foreign
land; yet the mingling bloods of Dacre and of Howard would not in a
moment have permitted her to forget The inviolate island of the sage and
free! even if the unceasing and ever-watchful exertions of her father
had been wanting to make her worthy of so illustrious an ancestry.
But this, happily, was not the case; and to aid the development of the
infant mind of his young child, to pour forth to her, as she grew
in years and in reason, all the fruits of his own richly-cultivated
intellect, was the solitary consolation of one over whose conscious head
was impending the most awful of visitations. May Dacre was gifted with
a mind which, even if her tutor had not been her father, would have
rendered tuition a delight.
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