With a somewhat savage and truculent air he drew his eyebrows down over his eyes as he spoke; but there was a touch of something else as well—of stirred emotion, of doubt, of troubled feeling—which dissipated Cynthia's fears at once. She left the chair which she had been grasping with one hand, and came closer to her visitor.
"I see that you are afraid to trust me," she said quickly. "You think that perhaps I am hard and worldly, and do not want to have anything to do with my relatives? That is not true. You are thinking—speaking—of my poor father perhaps. As long as I was a child—a mere girl—I did not think much about him, I was content to believe what people told me—not that he was guilty—I never believed that!—but that I could do nothing for him, and that I had better not interfere. When I was independent and beginning to think for myself—about six months ago—I found out what I might have done. Shall I go on to tell you what I did?"
"Yes, yes—go on!" The man's voice was husky; his wrinkled hand trembled as it lay upon his knee. He watched the girl's face with hungry eyes.
"I wrote to the Governor of the prison," said Cynthia, "and told him that I had only just discovered—having been such a child—that I could write to my father or see him at regular intervals, and that I should like to do so from time to time. He asked me in return how it was that an intimation—which had been forwarded, I believe, to certain persons interested in my welfare—of my father's fate had not been given to me. My father had, by a desperate effort, succeeded in escaping from Portland; he had never been recaptured; and, from certain information received, the authorities believed that he was dead. He added however that he had a shrewd suspicion that Andrew Westwood had thrown dust into the eyes of the police, had left the country, and was not dead at all."
"And begged you to communicate with the authorities if you heard from him, I suppose?"
"No; he did not go so far as that to the man's own daughter," said Cynthia calmly. "And it would, of course, have been useless if he had."
"Why—why?"
"Because," said the girl, her lips suddenly trembling and her eyes filling with tears—"because I love my father, and would do anything in the world for him—if he would let me. Can you not tell me where he is? I would give all I have to see him once again!"
Reuben Dare fidgeted in his chair, and half turned his face away. Then, without meeting her eager tearful eyes, he replied half sullenly—
"The Governor was right. He got away—away to America."