‘No. Yet there was something in the face that seemed familiar to me. When he spoke I knew that I had heard the voice before. It seemed kind and friendly, like the voice of some one I had known long ago. He told me to try and realize what change ten years of evil fortune would make in a man’s looks. It was not time only which had altered him, he told me, but the world’s ill-usage, bad health, hard work, corroding sorrow. “Make allowance for all this,” he said, “and look at me with indulgent eyes, and then try to send your thoughts back to that old life at Chiswick, and say what part I had in it.” I did look at him very earnestly, and the more I looked the more familiar the face grew. “I think you must be a friend of my father’s,” I said at last. “Poverty has no friends,” he answered; “at the time you remember your father was friendless. Oh, child, child, can ten years blot out a father’s image? I am your father.”’ Laura paused, with quickened breathing, recalling the agitation of that moment. ‘I cannot tell you how I felt when he said this,’ she continued, presently. ‘I thought I was going to fall fainting at his feet. My brain clouded over; I could understand nothing; and then, when my senses came slowly back, I asked him how this could be true? Did not my father die a few hours after I was taken away by Jasper Treverton? My benefactor had told me that it was so. Then he--my father--said that he had allowed Jasper Treverton to suppose him dead, for my sake; in order that I might be the adopted child of a rich man, and well placed in life, while he--my real father--was a waif and stray, and a pauper. Mr. Treverton had received a letter announcing his old friend’s death--a letter written in a feigned hand by my father himself and had never taken the trouble to inquire into the particulars of the death and burial. He felt that he had done enough in leaving money for the sick man’s use, and in relieving him of all care about his daughter. This is what my father told me. How could I reproach him, Jack, or despise him for this deception, for a falsehood which so degraded him? It was for my sake he had sinned.’ ‘And you had no doubt as to his identity? You were fully assured that he was that very father whom you had supposed dead and buried ten years before?’ ‘How could I doubt? He showed me papers--letters--that could have belonged to no one but my father. He gave me my mother’s portrait; and then, through the mist of years, his face came back to me as a face that had been very familiar; his voice had the sound of long ago.’ ‘Did you give him money on this first meeting?’