"She never went near the foundling asylum. She had at her own home an infant, the child of a worthless daughter, who had run away previously to go on the stage. Leaving this child on her mother's hands, the actress again ran away, and the old grandmother palmed it off on you as a foundling." "My God! I see it all," groaned Edmund Clarke. "The old fiend exchanged infants, putting her grandchild in the place of my daughter, and raising her in poverty and wretchedness. I have seen my child with her, my beautiful daughter. Listen to my story," he cried, pouring out to the astonished old physician the whole moving story of Liane Lester. CHAPTER XXII. AT A FIEND'S MERCY. Doctor Jay listened with breathless attention, and so did Roma. Pale as a breathing statue, her great eyes dilated with dismay and horror, her heart beating heavily and slow, Roma crouched in her chair and listened to the awful words that told her who and what she was, the base-born child of Cora Jenks, and granddaughter of old granny, whose very name was a synonym for contempt in Stonecliff. She, Roma, who despised poor people, who treated them no better than the dust beneath her well-shod feet, belonged to the common herd, and was usurping the place of beautiful Liane, whom she had despised for her lowly estate and hated for her beauty, but who had become first her rival in love and now in fortune. To the day of her death beautiful, wicked Roma never forgot that bleak November night, that blasted all her pride and flung her down into the dust of humiliation and despair, her towering pride crushed, all the worst passions of her evil nature aroused into pernicious activity. Stiller than chiseled marble, the stricken girl crouched there, listening, fearing to lose even a single word, though each one quivered like a dagger in her heart. Her greatest enemy could not have wished her a keener punishment than this knowledge of her position in the Clarke household--an adopted daughter, secretly despised and only tolerated for the mother's sake, holding her place only until the real heiress should be discovered. No words could paint her rage, her humiliation, her terrors of the future, that held a sword that might at any moment fall. Oh, how she hated the world, and every one in it, and most of all Liane Lester, her guiltless rival. While she listened, she wished the girl dead a hundred times, and all at once a throbbing memory came to her of the fierce words Granny Jenks had spoken in her rage against Liane. "I would beat her; yes, I would kill her, before she should steal your grand lover from you darling!" Roma could understand now the old hag's devotion to herself. It was the tie of their kinship asserting itself. She shuddered with disgust as she recalled the old woman's fulsome admiration and adoration, and how she had been willing to sell her very soul for one kiss from those fresh, rosy lips. How eagerly she had said: