“Not at all. I wanted to _know_ you as you were, not what you pretended to be. I do not need to tell you the result of my plan; we all know it but too well. No one gave me a word of sympathy or kindness save this dear girl”—he laid his hand tenderly on Star’s shoulder—“who did her utmost to make the old man forget as far as was possible his bitter disappointment, and who had already earned his love and gratitude by saving his life, almost at the sacrifice of her own, during that terrible voyage across the Atlantic. She has been like a sunbeam to me from the first; and when I saw how unkind you all were to her also—how you were betraying your trust and breaking your promise to her dying father—I resolved that she should become my especial care for the future. “I do not need to recall to your memory the last night that we spent in your house in Yonkers. It must be as fresh to you as it is to me. You taunted us both with our poverty and dependence. You drove _her_ to desperation by your unjust accusations and your heartless language. She could not endure that kind of a life any longer, and she knew that I also was anything but happy; so she came to me, told me the secret of her success as an author, and of the income which her book bade fair to bring her, and begged of me to go with her to share her substance, asking in return only the comfort of congenial companionship and the protection which my presence would give her. I was sorely tempted, as I have told her, to confess the part I had been playing, and proclaim her my heiress on the spot. But I thought, considering all things, it would be better to wait until she was through with school, while I wanted to study her a little more closely before committing my all to her. She has stood the test most nobly. She has been the light of our home. She has labored early and late to minister to my comfort and happiness, and _now_ she is going to reap her reward. Everything that I _can_ do for her to make her life bright, I _shall_ do while I live, and when I am gone, she will have the fortune which, under different circumstances, would have been mostly yours.” Mrs. Richards was pallid with anger, mortification, and bitter disappointment when Mr. Rosevelt concluded. It was a terrible blow to her to lose this great fortune, and remorse for her heartless treatment of her uncle was gnawing keenly at her heart-strings. Mr. Richards had met with heavy losses in his business of late, and it was only by straining every nerve, calculating, and contriving, that she and Josephine had been able to come to Newport at all that season, and it was simply maddening to think that Star, whom she had so disliked from the first, should have won, by little acts of kindness, what she would have spared no pains to secure had she once suspected the truth.