"Yes, Queenie, I must have a full explanation of your mysterious absence, for I fear it covers wrong or guilt. Secrecy is seldom without sin," he answered, in a firm but heart-wrung voice. His daughter wrung her white hands, moaning and weeping. "Oh! papa, I _cannot, cannot_ tell you," she exclaimed. Mr. Lyle took the white hands that were wildly beating the air, and held them firmly in both his own. "Be calm, Queenie," he said, "and listen to me. There can be no question of _cannot_ between you and me! You have deceived us all and spent a year away from us. You return to us wretched and alone, with the marks of cruel violence upon your person. What are we to think of you, Queenie, if you refuse to explain the mystery? How can we receive you back with a secret, perhaps a shameful one, in your life? I must have your vindication from your own lips, my poor child. Answer me, Queenie, where have you spent this missing year of your life?" She wrenched her hands away and looked about her wildly. "Let me go--I cannot stay here! Oh! why did I ever come?" she wailed. "I was mad, mad!" He laid her forcibly back upon the bed. She was too weak to resist him, and lay panting and moaning in wild despair. "Queenie, you torture me," he said, hoarsely; "I must have the truth from you. Tell me, dear, has anyone wronged you? If it is so, I will have the villain's heart's blood!" She shivered and trembled where she lay held down by his strong hands. "Too late," she moaned, in a voice half-triumphant, half-despairing. "I have taken vengeance into my own hands--I have," she broke off shivering and sobbing, with a look of awful horror in the white face with the terrible, purple print of a boot-heel on the marble brow. "Tell me all, dear," he said, his voice sharp with anxiety and foreboding. She looked up, trembling and shivering, and wailed out: "Papa, be merciful--spare me, spare me!" He made no answer. His head was bowed on his hands, his face hidden. Queenie looked at him and saw with a sudden sharp pang how strangely his clustering locks had whitened in the past year. She raised herself up and threw her arms around him, laying her cheek against his shoulder. "Papa," she whispered, mournfully, "look up--I will tell you all--but only to _you, you alone_, dearest and best of fathers--can I reveal the _terrible_ secret that has ruined my life!" With her cheek against his shoulder and her hand locked in his, Queenie Lyle poured forth in burning words the story of that missing year--the saddest story to which her father had ever listened--yet he made no comment, uttered no word, until she had finished and thrown herself down at his feet with the wailing cry: "Papa, can you _ever_ forgive me?" He did not try to lift her up as she lay there. He only said in a deep, intense voice, with a lightning flash in his deep eyes: "Queenie, you have forgotten to tell me one thing--_his name_." She shuddered from head to foot.