over the hardness
and strangeness of her fate.

To one who knew all the facts of her story and her father's story, it
might indeed have been a matter for meditation that "wrong-doing never
ends"--that, because Sydney Vane had been an unprincipled man and
Florence Lepel a woman without a conscience, therefore a child of whom
they never heard had grown up without the presence of a father's love,
or the innate reverence for truth that prevailed in the heart of a
Jeanie Deans. Cynthia was no Jeanie Deans; she was a faulty but
noble-hearted woman, with a nature that had suffered some slight warping
from the effect of adverse circumstance.

Cynthia and her father met the next morning under the spreading branches
of the trees in Kensington Gardens; and there, as they walked up and
down together, Westwood unfolded his plans. From what he let
slip--although he tried not to be too definite--it was evident that he
had made considerable sums of money, or what he thought such; and he
wanted Cynthia to give up working, and "go West" with him. He assured
her that she should have every comfort, every luxury; that he was likely
to make more and more money as time went on, and that he might even
become a millionaire. Would she not partake of the magnificence that was
in store for her? But Cynthia shook her head. And then he spoke of his
loneliness, of his long absence from his only child, and his desire to
have a home of his own; now that he began to feel the infirmities of
age, he not only wanted a daughter as an ornament to his house, but as
the prop of his declining years. And at this Cynthia shed tears and
began to waver. Ought she not to go with her father? she asked herself.
It might be better for Hubert, as well as for her, if she went away;
and, even if at the end of two years she became Hubert's wife, she would
at any rate have had two years with her father. And, if Hubert married
"the other girl," she would stay with her father until his life's
end--or hers. But the fact remained at the end of all arguments--she did
not want to go.

"What do you want to stay in England for?" Westwood said at length. "Is
it to make money? I've got enough for both of us. Is it to sing in
public? You'll get bigger audiences over there, my girl. If you love
your old father as you say you do, why won't you come along with him?"
He paused, and added, almost in a whisper, "Unless there's somebody you
like better, I don't see why you want to stay."