"Ellie... my little Ellie..."
Baron Faro knelt on one knee and pulled the girl before him tightly into his arms, his voice choked.
His eyes were red, and the muscles in his utterly haggard face trembled, revealing the undisguised surge of emotion in his heart.
By contrast, it was the Baron's Daughter—Miss Ellie—who looked at a loss. She merely kept her clear, innocent eyes open, her expression blank as she stared over her father's shoulder at the wall behind him.
Putting oneself in her place, it was not hard to understand.
For one thing, the girl had only just recovered from a large dose of sleeping potion. Her head was not even clear yet. She was still in the dazed state that followed a long faint, her mind sluggish, unable to grasp the situation before her.
For another, although to the baron, his daughter's disappearance had made every minute and every second torment, and even though not even twenty-four hours had passed, his own mental strength had been greatly drained by worry, leaving him exhausted in both body and mind.
But from Ellie's perspective, throughout the entire incident, the greatest shock she had suffered was nothing more than the attack on the carriage she had been riding on her way home yesterday evening.
After that, she had fallen unconscious under the effects of the potion.
To her, in a certain sense, it was almost as if she had still been sitting in the carriage one moment, then opened her eyes the next to find herself already in her emotional father's arms.
She could not feel any of the twists and turns in between at all.
Xia Nan and the others were received with immense gratitude and enthusiasm by Grace, the butler of the Baron's Mansion. He paid no mind at