The girl was quick enough to observe this, and she proceeded at once to make capital out of it, appealing to his kindness and sympathy, assuring him that she loved his friend with all her heart, acknowledging to the full how she had deceived him, and then humbly soliciting the barrister’s advice. Old memories came back to the barrister as the woman continued to talk, and her tears did not fail to soften the hues of that picture of old which would rise up between himself and the humiliated woman before him. Leading her on from one topic to another he induced her to narrate her history, and by slow degrees she repeated to him the heads of the story which she had told Dibble on the Severntown race-course. Feeling sure that this would excite the barrister’s sympathy, she hoped that it might in some way make him her friend. Watching the effect of all she was saying, the girl perceived that her listener was peculiarly touched; and when at the proper moment she produced that little miniature which she had shown to Dibble, Mr. Arundel Williamson, exclaiming “Good heavens, can it be possible!” threw himself back in his chair and nearly fainted. Fixing her eyes upon him as he grasped the locket, the woman, with the cunning of the race-course and the lodging-house, the precocity of poverty, and her fixed faith in Carkey’s prophecy about her parentage, felt at once that the hour of discovery had come. “You are my father!” she said, with an air of pride and triumph. “That lady was your wife.” “God help us!” said the barrister solemnly. “He visits the sins of the fathers upon the children indeed!” “You won’t drive me away now,” said the girl quickly; “you won’t try to make him hate me, and put me in prison now. If you don’t like me to be your daughter, let me go away with him; tell him all that about Gibbs is a lie,--he will believe you--he will believe anything--don’t separate us--I will never tell anybody you are my father.” The barrister made no reply; he rocked himself to and fro in his chair, and looked vacantly at the girl, as if he were in a dream. “I am your father,” said the barrister presently; “there is no doubt about that. The sin and the punishment are so equal, and the parentage is so fearfully verified in your own career and conduct: there is no cheating heaven, no tricking the law of punishment in this world. God knows I have suffered too, without this additional pain and degradation.” “You’re ashamed of me, then?” said the woman. “Lieutenant Somerton is not; let me go away with him.” “Never!” exclaimed the barrister: “never!” * * * * *