“You will do as I tell you!” he swore, the veins in his forehead starting into ugly prominence. “You, a beggar’s brat, born in a hovel, dare to set your will against mine! You should by rights be tramping from door to door at the heels of some filthy caravan, selling brooms, and stealing chickens, with a hedge to sleep under, and the police on your track! Do you know what you are--you, with your white face, and your defiant airs and graces, who do not consider an earl’s son good enough for you, but must needs disgrace yourself by a servant-girl flirtation in the corridor with a man who will make your folly a smoking-room jest? You think yourself a duke’s grandchild, a Douglas by descent, and daughter to my wife, Lady Gwendolen. But you came into this world some months before I ever saw that lady; you were born in a miserable cabin, and your mother was a wayside tramp, a common gypsy!” He hurled the words at her with stinging emphasis. She stood before him, pale as ashes, her eyes distended, quivering in every limb. But for the support of the chair she would have fallen to the ground. A hundred little incidents seemed to start simultaneously to prominence in her mind as she listened to him, chief among them being the old fortune-teller’s assurance that she was a “Romany,” and that the gypsies would befriend her. Stephen Lee, too, through whom she was to communicate if necessary with old Sarah, had he not told her only that day that there was not so much difference between her rank and his as she supposed? And Dr. Netherbridge’s strange recognition of her by her “likeness to her mother,” was not that also a link in the chain? The room seemed to rock round her, and the ground to give way under her feet. Something told her that her father was speaking the truth, and her heart contracted with pain as she realized that gentle, affectionate Lady Cranstoun, from whom she had received the only tenderness and kindness which had as yet warmed her young life, might not really be her mother after all. But whatever she felt, however great her astonishment, dismay, and even horror at his words, it was chiefly necessary to retain her self-control, and no cry, no exclamation escaped her lips as she mutely waited for her father to say more. “When my wife, Lady Gwendolen, lost her child,” Sir Philip went on, mercilessly, “you were sent for and admitted into this house on sufferance, lest she should lose her reason. The poor, weak-witted thing chose to believe that you were hers, and partly to humor her, partly to conceal your disgraceful origin, I allowed the deception to be kept up until now. You would never have known from what beggar’s stock you sprang but from your folly and pride, which to me, who know the truth about your origin, is equally offensive and ridiculous.” “Will you tell me one thing?” she asked, in an unnaturally steady voice. “You say I am not Lady Cranstoun’s child; am I yours?”