You cannot deny the fact, I suppose, especially since I have taken the
trouble to search the registers and verify each separate document.

"I gave them all back to her, for I shall never need them. The woman--I
mean my mother--was quite right. I shall not marry Don Orsino
Saracinesca. You have lied to me throughout my life. You have always
told me that my mother was dead, and that I need not be ashamed of my
birth, though you wished it kept a secret. So far, I have obeyed you. In
that respect, and only in that, I will continue to act according to your
wishes. I am not called upon to proclaim to the world and my
acquaintance that I am the daughter of my own servant, and that you were
kind enough to marry your estimable mistress after my birth in order to
confer upon me what you dignify by the name of legitimacy. No. That is
not necessary. If it could hurt you to proclaim it I would do so in the
most public way I could find. But it is folly to suppose that you could
be made to suffer by so simple a process.

"Are you aware, my father, that you have ruined all my life from the
first? Being so bad, you must be intelligent and you must realise what
you have done, even if you have done it out of pure love of evil. You
pretended to be kind to me, until I was old enough to feel all the pain
you had in store for me. But even then, after you had taken the trouble
to marry my mother, why did you give me another name? Was that
necessary? I suppose it was. I did not understand then why my older
companions looked askance at me in the convent, nor why the nuns
sometimes whispered together and looked at me. They knew perhaps that no
such name as mine existed. Since I was your daughter why did I not bear
your name when I was a little girl? You were ashamed to let it be known
that you were married, seeing what sort of wife you had taken, and you
found yourself in a dilemma. If you had acknowledged me as your daughter
in Austria, your friends in Rome would soon have found out my
existence--and the existence of your wife. You were very cautious in
those days, but you seem to have grown careless of late, or you would
not have left those papers in the care of the Countess Spicca, my
maid--and my mother. I have heard that very bad men soon reach their
second childhood and act foolishly. It is quite true.

"Then, later, when you saw that I loved, and was loved, and was to be
happy, you came between my love and me. You appeared in your own