In the seven years I lived without Gwendolyn, my life was free and without encumbrance. My father, Edward Farnsworth, owned lands and properties that extended far beyond my little world. I was told, as a small child, that he worked in New York City. I had some idea that our family name reached far back into the past; almost, but not quite, to the Mayflower. If people referred to our estate, they called it Thornton. Just that. I don't know where the name came from; father never told me that I recall. All I knew of my father - all I really ever knew, to be truthful - was that he dealt in money and that we were rich; rich from the past, and rich in the present. In rare moments I would find him in his study and we would share a distant kind of bond. He would hold me to him with a kind of bemused look on his face; as if he wondered at what he had sired. Then he would smile at me, silently, and turn back to his work.