"And you think you can live without companionship?" he said. "You will find you are mistaken; but of that I have no right to speak. There is one subject, however, on which I do claim this right, and it is the fulfilment of this purpose which has brought me to America." "You came all this way to see me?" she said, lifting her brows as if in gentle deprecation. "You were always kind." Her voice broke and she said no more. "It is not a question of kindness," he said. "It is a matter of the simplest right and duty. Will you hear me? Are you able to hear me to-night, or shall I come again to-morrow?" "Speak now," she said. "I am perfectly well, and am ready to hear whatever you may have to say." Her voice gave proof of a recovered self-control. The necessity of making this a final interview between them was borne in upon her, and sitting very still and erect, with her hands clasped tightly together, she waited to hear what he might say. "Your leaving England so suddenly," he began, "was, as I need not say, a disappointment to me. I had hoped to change your mind and purpose concerning the acceptance not only of money which is your own by legal right, but of such as is also yours by every rational law of possession. It was to me an insupportable idea that you should go away without the means of living as becomes your rank and station." Bettina, with a rather chill smile, shook her head. "Rank and station I have none," she said. "I have money enough to live as becomes my mother's child; that I am, and no more. It is the only bond to the past which I acknowledge. The name and title which I bore a little while were never mine in a real and true sense. I do not care to speak of it; it is all past; but the very fact that your cousin saw fit to leave me with what you call a mere pittance shows that he felt the distance, the lack of union, between us, as I felt and feel it." It was a relief to her to say this much. He could gather nothing from it, and she wanted him to know that she had freed her soul from every vestige of its bondage to the man whom she chose to designate as his cousin rather than by any relationship to herself--even a past one. This point did not escape him. "It is with humiliation that I receive your reminder that that man was, in flesh and blood at least, akin to me," was the answer; "and for that reason I have felt it to be my duty to make whatever poor reparation may be in my power for the evil that he has done." He spoke with extreme seriousness, and there was a tone in his last words which conveyed to Bettina the suspicion that they referred to something more than any act of Lord Hurdly's which had heretofore been mentioned between them. She waited, therefore, in some agitation to hear what his next words should be.