that you are the thieves who claiming kinship by virtue
of that very marriage have usurped his estates and this his castle
during all these years, whilst he himself went an outcast, homeless and
destitute? Is that what you ask me to believe?"

"Even so," he assented, with a feeble sob.

Her face was pale--white to the very lips, and her blue eyes smouldered
behind the shelter of her drooping lids. She put her hand to her breast,
then to her brow, pushing back the brown hair by a mechanical gesture
that was pathetic in the tale of pain it told. For support she was
leaning now against the wall by the head of his couch. In silence she
stood so while you might count to twenty; then with a sudden vehemence
revealing the passion of anger and grief that swayed her:

"Why," she cried, "why in God's name do you tell me this?"

"Why?" His utterance was thick, and his eyes, that were grown dull as a
snake's, stared straight before him, daring not to meet his daughter's
glance. "I tell it you," he said, "because I am a dying man." And he
hoped that the consideration of that momentous fact might melt her, and
might by pity win her back to him--that she was lost to him he realized.

"I tell you because I am a dying man," he repeated. "I tell it you
because in such an hour I fain would make confession and repent, that
God may have mercy upon my soul. I tell it you, too, because the tragedy
begun eighteen years ago is not yet played out, and it may yet be mine
to avert the end we had prepared--Joseph and I. Thus perhaps a merciful
God will place it in my power to make some reparation. Listen, child.
It was against us, as you will have guessed, that Galliard enlisted
Kenneth's services, and here on the night of Joseph's return he called
upon the boy to fulfil him what he had sworn. The lad had no choice but
to obey; indeed, I forced him to it by attacking him and compelling him
to draw, which is how I came by this wound.

"Crispin had of a certainty killed Joseph but that your uncle bethought
him of telling him that his son lived."

"He saved his life by a lie! That was worthy of him," said Cynthia
scornfully.

"Nay, child, he spoke the truth, and when Joseph offered to restore the
boy to him, he had every intention of so doing. But in the moment of
writing the superscription to the letter Crispin was to bear to those
that had reared the child, Joseph bethought him of a foul scheme for
Galliard's final destruction. And so he ha