a tremendous convulsion laid hold on her body and
soul, and she was racked and shaken by it, and at its crisis her
outstretched hands opened and showered the top of the desk with jewels,
then flew to her head and clutched her throbbing temples.

She cried out in a low voice of suffering: _"No!"_

And of a sudden she was reeling back from the desk, toward the corridor
door, repeating over and over on an ascending scale: _"No! no! no! no!
no!"_

Her quaking legs blundered against a chair, her knees gave, she tottered to
fall; strong arms caught her, held her safe, a voice she knew yet didn't
know in its guarded key muttered in her ear: "Thank God!"

She made no struggle, but her eyes of pain and terror sought the speaker's
face, and saw that he was the man Nogam. In extremity of amazement she
spoke his name. He shook his head.

"No longer Nogam," he said in the same low accents, and smiled--"but your
father, Michael Lanyard!"

XIX

UNMASKING

One more instant the girl rested passive in uncomprehending astonishment;
then abruptly she exerted herself to break free from the supporting
embrace, but found the effort wasted for lack of opposition, so that her
own violence sent her reeling away half a dozen paces, to bring up against
the desk; while Lanyard, making no move more than to drop his rejected
arms, remained where she had left him, and requited her indignant stare
with a broken smile of understanding, a smile at once tender, tolerant, and
sympathetic, with a little quirk of rueful humour for good measure.

"My father!" Sofia repeated in a gasp of disdain--"_you!_"

He gave a slight shrug.

"Such, it appears, is your sad fortune."

"A servant!"

"And not the proud prince you were promised? Rather a come down, one must
admit." Lanyard laughed low, and moved nearer. "I'm sorry, I mean I might
be (for myself, too) if Nogam were less a fraud than that pretentious
mountebank, Prince Victor--or for the matter of that, if you were as poor
of spirit as you would seem on your own valuation, if you were not at heart
your mother's daughter, and mine, my child by a woman whom I loved well,
and who long ago loved me!"

He paused deliberately to let her grasp the full sense of his words, then
pursued:

"It may help you get your bearings to know that I am truly the Michael
Lanyard to whom Messieurs Secretan & Sypher addressed their
advertisement--you remember--as this should prove."

He offered a slip of pa