For the moment the blow stunned him; he knelt there looking at the too-well-remembered face—the face that had haunted him sleeping and waking—the face that he would have given years of his life utterly to forget. It was the same face; on that point there could be no shadow of doubt. The same face in the pride of youth, the bloom and freshness of early manhood. The same keen eyes; the same hooked nose, with its suggestion of affinity to the hawk and vulture tribe; the unmistakable form of the low brow, with its strongly marked perceptives and deficiency in the organs of thought; the black hair, growing downward in a little peak; the somewhat angular brows. ‘My father’s portrait,’ said Lucille, recovering quickly from that shock of surprise. ‘To think that my grandfather should have thrust it out of sight, here amongst all this worthless rubbish. How bitterly he must have hated his only son!’ _‘Your father!’_ cried Lucius, letting the picture drop from his nerveless hands, and turning to Lucille with a face white as the plaster head of Diana. ‘Do you mean to tell me that man was your father?’ ‘My dear father,’ the girl answered sadly; ‘my father, whom I shall love to the end of my life, whom I love all the better for his misfortunes, whom I pity with all my heart for the ill fate that changed his father’s natural affection into a most unnatural hate.’ She took up the portrait, and carried it to a clearer spot, where she laid it gently down upon an old curtain. ‘I will find a better place for it by and by,’ she said. ‘It was too cruel of my grandfather to send it up here. And I have so often begged him to show me a picture of my father.’ ‘I wonder you can remember his face after so long an interval,’ said Lucius, who had in some measure regained his self-possession, though his brain seemed still full of strange confused thoughts, amidst which the one horrible fact stood forth with hideous distinctness.