him flooded her heart. If she had
known this story before, she would have understood, and instead of
thinking him unkind and misanthropic she would have tried to be a better
daughter to him. The new-found knowledge illuminated all the past and
seemed to draw them closely together.

"_Mother_ would have believed in you, Dad," she ventured to say.

"Thank God she never knew! She was spared that at any rate. I raged
against Providence when I lost her, but afterwards I felt she had been
'taken away from the evil to come.' Her relations thought me guilty. I
went to them and explained, but they practically told me I was lying.
When I went abroad I never sent them my address. I just wished to
vanish. I don't suppose they have ever troubled to inquire for me. Who
cares about a ruined and disgraced man?"

"_I_ care, Dad," said Lorna. "I'm only fifteen and I can't understand
everything, but if you'll let me the least little bit take Mother's
place, may I try? I'm not much, but perhaps I'm better than nobody, and
we two seem all alone in the world."

For the first time in five years the barrier between them was down, and
Lorna was hugging her father as in the old happy childish days. To know
all is to forgive all, and her resentment against his treatment of her
turned into a deep pitying love. She would never be frightened of him
again. A new impulse seemed to have come to her. If she could in any way
comfort him for what he had suffered, it would be something to live for.

"He's my father, and I'll stick to him through thick and thin," she
said to herself fiercely, as she went to bed that night. "I don't know
who this enemy is, but if ever I meet him I'll hate him and all
belonging to him. I say it, and I don't go back on my word. I'll be my
own witness as nobody else is present. Lorna Carson, you've taken up a
feud and you've got to carry it through. May all the bad luck in the
world come down upon you if you break your oath."

CHAPTER VIII

At Pompeii

Lorna returned to Fossato feeling as if she had passed through a great
crisis. The short week-end and its revelation seemed to have added years
to her life. She had never been a typical specimen of "sparkling
girlhood," but her new knowledge made her more sedate than ever. It
brought her both gain and loss: gain in the fact that she now shared her
father's confidence, and could help him to bear his heavy burden, and
loss in the sense of a yet wider division betwe