“Why, yes. I am not like to forget it, and nightly do I pray,” she went on, her tongue outrunning discretion and betraying her feelings for Galliard, “that God may punish those murderers who wrecked his existence.” “Hush, girl,” he whispered in a quavering voice. “You know not what you say.” “Indeed I do; and as there is a just God my prayer shall be answered.” “Cynthia,” he wailed. His eyes were wild, and the hand that rested in hers trembled violently. “Do you know that it is against your father and your father's brother that you invoke God's vengeance?” She had been kneeling at his bedside; but now, when he pronounced those words, she rose slowly and stood silent for a spell, her eyes seeking his with an awful look that he dared not meet. At last: “Oh, you rave,” she protested, “it is the fever.” “Nay, child, my mind is clear, and what I have said is true.” “True?” she echoed, no louder than a whisper, and her eyes grew round with horror. “True that you and my uncle are the butchers who slew their cousin, this man's wife, and sought to murder him as well--leaving him for dead? True that you are the thieves who claiming kinship by virtue of that very marriage have usurped his estates and this his castle during all these years, whilst he himself went an outcast, homeless and destitute? Is that what you ask me to believe?” “Even so,” he assented, with a feeble sob. Her face was pale--white to the very lips, and her blue eyes smouldered behind the shelter of her drooping lids. She put her hand to her breast, then to her brow, pushing back the brown hair by a mechanical gesture that was pathetic in the tale of pain it told. For support she was leaning now against the wall by the head of his couch. In silence she stood so while you might count to twenty; then with a sudden vehemence revealing the passion of anger and grief that swayed her: “Why,” she cried, “why in God's name do you tell me this?” “Why?” His utterance was thick, and his eyes, that were grown dull as a snake's, stared straight before him, daring not to meet his daughter's glance. “I tell it you,” he said, “because I am a dying man.” And he hoped that the consideration of that momentous fact might melt her, and might by pity win her back to him--that she was lost to him he realized.