"Father, you are all I have," she cried brokenly. "Look at me! Look at me and tell him that he lies!... You will not look at me? God have mercy on me, it is true, then!" She rose and spread her arms toward heaven to entreat God to witness her despair. "I did not think or know that such base things were done... That these loving hands should have helped to encompass my father's dishonor, his degradation! ... For money! What is money? You knew, father, that what was mine was likewise yours. Why did you not tell me? I should have laughed; we should have begun all over again; I could have earned a living with my music; we should have been honest and happy. And now!... And I drew those plans with a heart full of love and happiness! Oh, it is not that you gambled, that you have foolishly wasted a fortune; it is not these that hurt here,"--pressing her heart. "It is the knowledge that you, my father, should let _me_ draw those horrible things. It hurts! Ah, how it hurts!" A sob choked her. She knelt again at her parent's side and flung her arms around the unhappy, wretched man. "Father, you have committed a crime to shield a foolish act. I know, I know! What you have done you did for my sake, to give me back what you thought was my own. Oh, how well I know that you had no thought of yourself; it was all for me, and I thank God for that. But something has died here, something here in my heart. I have been so happy! ... too happy! My poor father!" She laid her head against his breast. "My heart is broken! Would to God that I might die!" Annesley threw one arm across the back of the chair and turned his face to his sleeve. Karloff, a thousand arrows of regret and shame and pity quivering in his heart, viewed the scene moodily, doggedly. No, he could not go back; there was indeed a wall behind him: pride. "Well, Mademoiselle?" She turned, still on her knees. "You say that if I do not marry you, you will ruin my father, expose him?" "Yes,"--thinly. "Listen. I am a proud woman, yet will I beg you not to do this horrible thing--force me into your arms. Take everything, take all that is left; you can not be so utterly base as to threaten such a wrong. See!"--extending her lovely arms, "I am on my knees to you!" "My daughter!" cried the father. "Do not interrupt me, father; he will relent; he is not wholly without pity." "No, no! No, no!" Karloff exclaimed, turning his head aside and repelling with his hands, as if he would stamp out the fires of pity which, at the sound of her voice, had burst anew in his heart. "I _will_ not give you up!" She drew her sleeve across her eyes and stood up. All at once she wheeled upon him like a lioness protecting its young. In her wrath she was as magnificent as the wife of--Aeneas at the funeral pyre of that great captain.