row I will speak with your
mother, and we shall then decide what shall be done. Only, understand
one thing: in the future you are not my dear daughter that you have been
in the past. I--I have no daughter," he added in a voice harsh yet
broken by emotion, "for you have now proved yourself an enemy worse even
than those who for so many years have taken advantage of my
helplessness."

"Ah, dad, dad, you are cruel!" she cried, bursting again into a torrent
of tears. "You are too cruel! I have done nothing!"

"Do you call placing me in peril nothing?" he retorted bitterly. "Go to
your room at once. Remain with me, Flockart. I want to speak to you."

The girl saw herself convicted by those unfortunate words she had
used--words meant in defiance of her arch-enemy Flockart, but which had
placed her in ignominy and disgrace. Ah, if she could only stand firm
and speak the ghastly truth! But, alas! she dared not. Flockart, the man
who held her in his power, the man whom she knew to be her father's
bitterest opponent, a cheat and a fraud, stood there triumphant, with a
smile upon his lips; while she, pure, honest, and devoted to that
afflicted man, was denounced and outcast. She raised her voice in one
last word of faint protest.

But her father, angered and grieved, turned fiercely upon her and
ordered her from his presence. "Go," he said, "and do not come near me
again until your boxes are packed and you are ready to leave
Glencardine."

"You speak as though I were a servant whom you've discharged," she said
bitterly.

"I am speaking to my enemy, not to my daughter," was his hard response.

She raised her eyes to Flockart, and saw upon his dark face a hard,
sphinx-like look. What hope of salvation could she ever expect from that
man--the man who long ago had sought to estrange her from her father so
that he might work his own ends? It was upon her tongue to turn upon him
and relate the whole infamous truth. Yet so friendly had the two men
become of late that she feared, even if she did so, that her father
would only see in the revelation an attempt at reprisal. Besides, what
if Flockart spoke? What if he told the awful truth? Her own dear father,
whom she loved so well, even though he had misjudged her, would be
dragged into the mire. No, she was the victim of that man, who was a
past-master of the art of subterfuge; the man who, for years, had lived
by his wits and preyed upon society.

"Leave us, and go to your room,