ut myself adrift, and to-day I possess nothing save what I can earn for
myself in the theatre or elsewhere."

She sat stunned and pale under that cruel blow to her swelling pride.
Had he told her this but yesterday, it would have made no impression
upon her, it would have mattered not at all; the event of to-day coming
as a sequel would but have enhanced him in her eyes. But coming now,
after her imagination had woven for him so magnificent a background,
after the rashly assumed discovery of his splendid identity had made
her the envied of all the company, after having been in her own eyes and
theirs enshrined by marriage with him as a great lady, this disclosure
crushed and humiliated her. Her prince in disguise was merely the
outcast bastard of a country gentleman! She would be the laughing-stock
of every member of her father's troupe, of all those who had so lately
envied her this romantic good fortune.

"You should have told me this before," she said, in a dull voice that
she strove to render steady.

"Perhaps I should. But does it really matter?"

"Matter?" She suppressed her fury to ask another question. "You say
that this M. de Kercadiou is popularly believed to be your father. What
precisely do you mean?"

"Just that. It is a belief that I do not share. It is a matter of
instinct, perhaps, with me. Moreover, once I asked M. de Kercadiou
point-blank, and I received from him a denial. It is not, perhaps,
a denial to which one would attach too much importance in all the
circumstances. Yet I have never known M de Kercadiou for other than
a man of strictest honour, and I should hesitate to disbelieve
him--particularly when his statement leaps with my own instincts. He
assured me that he did not know who my father was."

"And your mother, was she equally ignorant?" She was sneering, but he
did not remark it. Her back was to the light.

"He would not disclose her name to me. He confessed her to be a dear
friend of his."

She startled him by laughing, and her laugh was not pleasant.

"A very dear friend, you may be sure, you simpleton. What name do you
bear?"

He restrained his own rising indignation to answer her question calmly:
"Moreau. It was given me, so I am told, from the Brittany village in
which I was born. But I have no claim to it. In fact I have no name,
unless it be Scaramouche, to which I have earned a title. So that you
see, my dear," he ended with a smile, "I have practised no deception
what