ife!" West paused, and strove vainly to master
the emotion which checked his utterance.

"My father rendered you a service?" said the young lady, eagerly,
regarding with involuntary interest the noble countenance of Bernard,
which, though it still bore traces of great suffering, was no longer
wild and haggard, as at his interview with the money-lender.

"A most unexpected and generous service," replied West, who, softening
down the first portion of the scene we have described, proceeded to
recount to the fair orphan the narrative of the great crisis in his
destiny.

"I knew it was so!" cried the young lady, almost hysterically affected;
"I knew he was not so grasping--so hard-hearted, as they said--as he
himself pretended. I knew he had a generous heart beneath all his
seeming avarice! Oh, you are not the only one doubtless whom he has thus
served!"

West did not discourage the illusion. Nay, the enthusiasm of the
charming woman before him was contagious. "Thanks to your father's
disinterested liberality," he resumed, "I am now in comparatively
prosperous circumstances. I came not merely to discharge a debt; believe
me, it is no common gratitude I feel! Doubtless you inherit all your
father's wealth--doubtless it is but little service I can ever hope to
render you. Yet I venture to entreat you never to forget that you
possess one friend of absolute devotion, ready at all times to sacrifice
himself in every way to your wishes and to your happiness."

West paused abruptly, for the singular expression of the young lady's
features filled him with astonishment.

"You do not know, then--" she began.

"Know what?"

"That I--am a--a natural child!" she completed, with, a crimson blush,
turning away her head as she spoke, and covering her face with her
hands--"that I am without fortune or relations; that my father died
intestate; that the heir-at-law, who lives abroad, and without whose
permission nothing can be done--moreover, who is said to be a heartless
spendthrift--will take all my father leaves; that I have but one more
week given me to vacate this house by the landlord; in short, that I
must work if I would not starve: that, in a word, I am a beggar!" And
the poor girl sobbed convulsively; while Bernard West, on whom this
speech acted as some terrible hurricane upon the trees of a tropical
forest, tearing up, as it were, by the roots, all the terrible stoicism
of his nature, and rousing hopes and dreams which he