have kept it from Ezra. I have not dared
to tell him. Pray forgive me that I can't do without telling you. I
_have_ more reason for being anxious. It is five days ago now. I am
quite sure I saw my father."

Mrs. Meyrick shrank into a smaller space, packing her arms across her
chest and leaning forward--to hinder herself from pelting that father
with her worst epithets.

"The year has changed him," Mirah went on. "He had already been much
altered and worn in the time before I left him. You remember I said how
he used sometimes to cry. He was always excited one way or the other. I
have told Ezra everything that I told you, and he says that my father
had taken to gambling, which makes people easily distressed, and then
again exalted. And now--it was only a moment that I saw him--his face
was more haggard, and his clothes were shabby. He was with a much
worse-looking man, who carried something, and they were hurrying along
after an omnibus."

"Well, child, he did not see you, I hope?"

"No. I had just come from Mrs. Raymond's, and I was waiting to cross
near the Marble Arch. Soon he was on the omnibus and gone out of sight.
It was a dreadful moment. My old life seemed to have come back again,
and it was worse than it had ever been before. And I could not help
feeling it a new deliverance that he was gone out of sight without
knowing that I was there. And yet it hurt me that I was feeling so--it
seemed hateful in me--almost like words I once had to speak in a play,
that 'I had warmed my hands in the blood of my kindred.' For where
might my father be going? What may become of him? And his having a
daughter who would own him in spite of all, might have hindered the
worst. Is there any pain like seeing what ought to be the best things
in life turned into the worst? All those opposite feelings were meeting
and pressing against each other, and took up all my strength. No one
could act that. Acting is slow and poor to what we go through within. I
don't know how I called a cab. I only remember that I was in it when I
began to think, 'I cannot tell Ezra; he must not know.'"

"You are afraid of grieving him?" Mrs. Meyrick asked, when Mirah had
paused a little.

"Yes--and there is something more," said Mirah, hesitatingly, as if she
were examining her feeling before she would venture to speak of it. "I
want to tell you; I cannot tell any one else. I could not have told my
own mother: I should have closed it up before her. I fee