Who must speak to me? Whom do I see? Is it possible? You, Waitwell? WAITWELL. How happy I am to see our young lady again! SARA. Good God, what do you bring me? I hear already, I hear already; you bring me the news of my father's death! He is gone, the excellent man, the best of fathers! He is gone, and I--I am the miserable creature who has hastened his death. WAITWELL. Ah, Miss---- SARA. Tell me, quick! tell me, that his last moments were not embittered by the thought of me; that he had forgotten me; that he died as peacefully as he used to hope to die in my arms; that he did not remember me even in his last prayer---- WAITWELL. Pray do not torment yourself with such false notions! Your father is still alive! He is still alive, honest Sir William! SARA. Is he still alive? Is it true? Is he still alive? May he live a long while yet, and live happily! Oh, would that God would add the half of my years to his life! Half! How ungrateful should I be, if I were not willing to buy even a few moments for him with all the years, that may yet be mine! But tell me at least, Waitwell, that it is not hard for him to live without me; that it was easy to him to renounce a daughter who could so easily renounce her virtue, that he is angry with me for my flight, but not grieved; that he curses me, but does not mourn for me. WAITWELL. Ah! Sir William is still the same fond father, as his Sara is still the same fond daughter that she was. SARA. What do you say? You are a messenger of evil, of the most dreadful of all the evils which my imagination has ever pictured to me! He is still the same fond father? Then he loves me still? And he must mourn for me, then! No no, he does not do so; he cannot do so? Do you not see how infinitely each sigh which he wasted on me would magnify my crime? Would not the justice of heaven have to charge me with every tear which I forced from him, as if with each one I repeated my vice and my ingratitude? I grow chill at the thought. I cause him tears? Tears? And they are other tears than tears of joy? Contradict me, Waitwell! At most he has felt some slight stirring of the blood on my account; some transitory emotion, calmed by a slight effort of reason. He did not go so far as to shed tears, surely not to shed tears, Waitwell? WAITWELL (_wiping his eyes_). No, Miss, he did not go so far as that. SARA. Alas! your lips say no, and your eyes say yes. WAITWELL. Take this letter Miss, it is from him himself---- SARA. From whom? From my father? To me? WAITWELL.