ll me to my
face what no man would dare to utter."

His voice was an angry pant, and he struck his clenched hand on the
table with a force that made the glasses jingle, and the sherry dance
in the decanter.

"Yes, you scarcely realize how much bravery this painful errand
demands; but the tender love in a woman's heart nerves her to bear
fiery ordeals, that vanquish a man's courage."

"Then you find that age has not drawn the fangs from the old crippled
Darrington lion, nor clipped his claws?"

The sneer curved his white mustache, until she saw the outline of the
narrow, bloodless underlip.

"That king of beasts scorns to redden his fangs, or flesh his claws, in
the quivering body of his own offspring. Your metaphor is an insult to
natural instincts."

She laid the letter once more before him, and looked down on him, with
ill-concealed aversion.

"Who are you? By what right dare you intrude upon me?"

"I am merely a sorrowful, anxious, poverty-stricken woman, whose heart
aches over her mother's sufferings and vho would never have endured the
humiliation of this interview, except to deliver a letter in the hope
of prolonging my mother's life."

"You do not mean that you are--my--"

"I am nothing to you, sir, but the bearer of a letter from your dying
daughter."

"You cannot be the child of--of Ellice?"

After the long limbo of twenty-three years, the name burst from him,
and with what a host of memories its echo peopled the room, where that
erring daughter had formerly reigned queen of his heart.

"Yes, Ellice is my dear mother's name."

He stared at the majestic form, and at the faultless face looking so
proudly down upon him, as from an inaccessible height; and she heard
him draw his breath, with a labored hissing sound.

"But--I thought her child was a boy?"

"I am the youngest of two children."

"It is impossible that you are the daughter of that infernal, low-born,
fiddling foreign vagabond who--"

"Hush! The dead are sacred!"

She threw up her hand, with an imperious gesture, not of deprecation,
but of interdict; and all the stony calm in her pale face seemed
shivered by a passionate gust, that made her eyes gleam like steel
under an electric flash.

"I am the daughter of Ignace Brentano, and I love, and honor his
memory, and his name. No drop of your Darrington blood runs in my
veins; I love my dear mother--but I am my father's daughter--and I want
no nobler heritage than his name. Upon