more he remembered how she used to
love him and trust in him, the more he felt that he could not stay away
from her; and so, although the risk was great--terrible--he determined
to come back to England and see with his own eyes whether she was safe
and well. And when he saw her"--there was a sob in her voice--"he said
to himself that perhaps after all she was a hard, unfeeling creature who
had forgotten him, or a wicked, treacherous woman who would betray her
own father, and that he would go away back to America and never see her
again, forgetting to ask whether she had not a heart and a memory too,
and whether it might not be that she had loved him all her life, and
whether she was not longing to fall upon his neck and kiss his dear
face, and tell him that she wanted a father for many, many dreary years,
and that she trusts him, believes in him, loves him with all her heart!
Oh, father, father!"--and Cynthia lay sobbing on his breast.

She had thrown herself impulsively on her knees beside him; her arms
were round his neck, and he was covering her face with kisses. He did
not attempt to deny that she had spoken the truth--that he was indeed
her father--the man who had been condemned to death, and whom she had
believed until this moment to be in America, if still indeed alive; but
neither did he try to prove the fact. He sat still, with his arms round
her, and--to her surprise--the tears running down his cheeks as freely
as they were running down her own. She looked up at him at last and
smiled rather piteously in his face.

"Dear father," she said, "and have you come all this way and run into so
much danger just to see me?"

"Yes, I have, Cynthy," said the man who called himself Reuben Dare. "I
said to myself, I can't get on any longer without seeing her, any way.
If that's my girl that sings--as her mother did before her--I shall know
her in a trice. But, bless you, my girl, I didn't--not till you began to
speak! And then t'was just like your mother."

"Am I so much altered?" said Cynthia wistfully.

"As much as you ought to be, my beauty, and no more. You ain't like the
skinny little bit of a thing that ran wild round Beechfield lanes; but
then you don't want to be. You're a good deal like your mother; but she
wasn't as dark as you. And, being so different, you see, I thought you
might be different in yourself--not ready to acknowledge your father as
belonging to you at all, maybe; and so I'd try you with a messa