"Yes, it is I," said Hubert. "I have been waiting to help you out. I don't know how I have offended you; but, whatever it is, forgive me, Cynthia--I can't bear your displeasure!" "Nor I yours," she said, with a sob; and, under the umbrella that he was holding, she actually held up her face to be kissed. Nobody saw the little ceremony of reconciliation. The next moment Cynthia was in the hall, having her dress shaken out and let down by a yawning maid's attentive hands, and the coachman had driven off, and the hall door was shut, and Hubert Lepel was out in the street, with a wall between him and his love. There were tears in Cynthia's eyes as she went wearily, her gaiety all departed, up to her room. Nobody suspected that the charming singer whose gaiety and audacity, as well as her beauty, had won all hearts that evening passed half the night in weeping on the hard floor--weeping over the fate that divided her from her lover. For ever since the day that she had learned from her father that Hubert Lepel was a cousin of the Vanes--more than ever now she knew that he was the man who had befriended her in her childhood--she felt it to be utterly impossible that she should marry him until he knew the truth; and the truth--that she was Westwood's daughter--would, she felt sure, part him from her for ever. CHAPTER XXXII. Early in the sweet June morning--sweet and fair although it brooded over London, the smokiest city in the world--Cynthia was again walking in Kensington Gardens. She had not gone far before she met her father, with whom she had made an appointment for that hour. "Well, Cynthia, my girl?" "I have come, you see, father." "I hardly thought you'd get here so soon after your party-going last night," said her father. "You look pretty tired too. Well, my girl, I told you I'd been staying down at Beechfield." "Yes; and I was terribly anxious about you all the time, father. It was such a daring thing to do! Suppose any one had suspected you?" "Not much fear o' that!" said Westwood, a little scornfully. "Why, look at me! Am I like the man I was at Beechfield ten years ago? I was a sort of outcast then, having sunk from bad to worse through my despair when I lost your mother, Cynthia; but, now that I have a new coat on my back and money in my pocket, all through my luck in the States, not to speak of this white hair, which I shall keep to until I'm back in the West again, I'm a different man, and nobody ever thinks of suspecting me." He was different, Cynthia noticed, in more than one respect--he was far less silent and morose than he used to be. Life in the West had brought out some unexpected reserves of decision and readiness of speech, and his success--his luck, as he sometimes called it--had cheered his spirits. He was defiant and he was often bitter still; but he was no longer downcast.