The_apple_of_his_eye

The count had lost his daughter sixteen years before the story opens. She was then a little child of six. One day the Count, out for a walk with his doctor, comes across a pretty young woman washing the clothes in a little stream. He finds that this is his lost child and is overjoyed. She tells him she is married and leads him to the gypsy wagon in which she and her husband, a mountebank, and her little child live. The Count offers her his home but she refuses to allow and goes home despondent and alone. His physician, however, puts into action a plan whereby he lures the girl to her father's house on the plea that her child can have better treatment. The mountebank suffers in silence this separation, but finally, unable to endure it he goes back to the house, but is turned away by the butler. Determined to get in and see his wife and child he climbs through the window, is discovered, arrested and about to be taken to prison when the little child appears and begs her father's liberty.