"Oh, then he is living still? He is well?"
"Oh, yes—he's living, and well enough! He hasn't done so badly neither. He got some land and 'struck ile,' as they say in America; and living under another name, and nobody knowing anything about him—he—well, he's had fair luck."
"And you come from him—you are a friend of his? Did he want to hear of me?"
"Yes, missy, he did. But he would scarce ha' known you if he'd met you in the street—you, grown so tall and handsome and dressed so fine. It was your name as gave him the clue—'Cynthia'—'Cynthia West'; for he read in the papers as you were singing at concerts, and he says to himself, 'Why, that's my gal, sure enough; and she hain't forgotten her mother's name!'"
"Go on!" said Cynthia quickly.
"Go on? What do you mean?" asked Reuben Dare, a little suspiciously. "There's nothing more to say, is there? And he asked me to make inquiries while I was in England—that was all."
"Oh, no, that was not all!" said Cynthia, drawing nearer, and holding out her hands a little, like one under hypnotic influence, fascinated by a power over which she had no control. "I can tell you the rest. The more he thought of his child, and the more he remembered how she used to love him and trust in him, the more he felt that he could not stay away from her; and so, although the risk was great—terrible—he determined to come back to England and see with his own eyes whether she was safe and well. And when he saw her"—there was a sob in her voice—"he said to himself that perhaps after all she was a hard, unfeeling creature who had forgotten him, or a wicked, treacherous woman who would betray her own father, and that he would go away back to America and never see her again, forgetting to ask whether she had not a heart and a memory too, and whether it might not be that she had loved him all her life, and whether she was not longing to fall upon his neck and kiss his dear face, and tell him that she wanted a father for many, many dreary years, and that she trusts him, believes in him, loves him with all her heart! Oh, father, father!"—and Cynthia lay sobbing on his breast.
She had thrown herself impulsively on her knees beside him; her arms were round his neck, and he was covering her face with kisses. He did not attempt to deny that she had spoken the truth—that he was indeed her father—the man who had been condemned to death, and whom she had believed until this moment to be in America, if still indeed alive; but neither did he try to prove the fact. He sat still, with his arms round her, and—to her surprise—the tears running down his cheeks as freely as they were running down her own. She looked up at him at last and smiled rather piteously in his face.
"Dear father," she said, "and have you come all this way and run into so much danger just to see me?"
"Yes, I have, Cynthy," said the man who called himself Reuben Dare. "I said to myself, I can't get on any longer without seeing her, any way. If that's my girl that sings—as her mother did before her—I shall know her in a trice. But, bless you, my girl, I didn't—not till you began to speak! And then t'was just like your mother."