“Papa! O papa! this is terrible. Why, in your anger against me, say things that are as cruel as they are without foundation?” cried Myra, starting to her feet, and approaching her father.
“Without foundation! It is true, girl, I say it is true. You are not my child!”
She did not believe him. How could she, poor girl; with the household links of many a happy year clinging about her heart? One word could not tear them away so readily, but the very thought made her pale as a corpse, and every nerve of her delicate frame trembled. A reproachful smile quivered over her lips, and she laid her hand upon the stern man’s arm.
“O father! I know that you are only angry; but this is too much. It would kill me to hear you say that again.”
Mr. D. turned. Anger was fierce within him still, and he took no pity on that pale and tortured girl.
“As there is a heaven above, you are not my child! I can prove it—have papers in the house that you shall see.”
A faint cry burst from Myra’s lips. She staggered back and fell upon a chair, her eyes distended, and fixed wildly upon the stern man, as if she searched in those angry features for a contradiction of the words he had spoken. She saw nothing there to relieve the doubt that ached at her heart.
“Not my father? mamma not my mother?” she murmured, and the tears began to rain over her white cheeks. She suddenly clasped her hands and stood up.
“Then whose child am I?”
Mr. D. sat down; the angry fire was fast going out from his heart, and it could sustain him no longer. Regret, keen and self-accusing, took possession of him then. Love, pity, every tender feeling that had so long enlinked that young girl to his heart, all came back like birds to a ravaged nest. He would have given worlds for the power to annihilate those ten minutes of his life, when one fierce gleam of anger had unlocked the hoarded secret of years. He turned his eyes almost imploringly on the trembling girl. His proud lip quivered, his hand shook as he rested it on his knee. Myra crept toward him, heart-broken and wretched, beyond all her previous ideas of wretchedness. She laid her hand upon his shoulder, and bent her face to his as she had done many a time in her childhood, when some small trouble oppressed her. But oh, how unlike her sweet childhood were those agonized features!