She understood everything, for her mind had gone rapidly over the past, gathering up proof here and there until all was plain to her,—the double lives of the two men, who were all she had to love, and the knowledge gave her nearly as much shame as pain that she should have been so deceived. She knew now why her mother died so suddenly, with that awful look on her face as her palsied tongue tried in vain to speak. She had discovered the truth and it had killed her. “Happy mother, to die!” she moaned. “I wish I could die too. Oh, father, I thought you a king among men, and Tom, too. I was so happy yesterday and this morning, with no thought that I was a brigand’s daughter,—that the men I wished could be caught and hung were father and Tom! Oh, I cannot bear it. I feel like a debased creature, whom no one would speak to, if he knew, and I loved Fanny so much, and she liked me some. But that is all over now. Tom meant to rob _her_, the only girl friend I ever had—Oh-h! I cannot bear it.” Her agony was intense as the horror grew upon her and she was burning with excitement and fever. There was a feeling in her as if she could not breathe, and every heart beat was like a heavy blow. She had opened a window and she tried to rise again and go to it for air, but could not, and she fell back upon her pillow with her eyes staring at the pointed ceiling of her room. It was a pretty room, furnished with many articles her father had bought for her and which she knew were expensive. Fanny had liked it and her presence there had lent a halo to everything. But Inez loathed it all now, knowing where the money came from which had bought these luxuries which a poor mountaineer’s daughter ought never to have. “I can’t stay here. I must go away and earn my living somewhere,” she was thinking, when she heard her father’s knock upon the door. He was coming to explain, she thought, and she did not want an explanation. Nothing could change the shameful facts, and she did not look at him as he came in and sat down beside her. Her hand was lying near him and she drew it away quickly as if afraid he might take it. He saw the motion and interpreted it aright. “Inez,” he began, “have no fear that I will touch you. I am not worthy to sit in the same room with you, and I am not here to make excuses; I want to ask what you know about Fanny Prescott. Who is she? I mean, who was her mother?” Inez was too stupified and bewildered to wonder at her father’s question and replied, “Her mother was a Miss Helen Tracy, of New York. Judge Prescott was her step-father, whose name she took when her mother married him. Her own father was a Mr. Hilton, who was killed in the mines of Montana when Fanny was a baby—Father, father, what is it? What is the matter?” she exclaimed, as her father fell forward upon the bed. Everything was for the time forgotten in her anxiety for him as he lay like one dead. “Tom, come quickly,” she cried, “Father is dying.”