The morrow came, and Myra stood by her father in his study, for he was still a father to her. The escritoir was open before them, and a large pocket-book, with the seal wrenched apart, lay upon the lid. Mr. D. sat with his head bent and shading his troubled forehead with one hand. Myra held a letter in her shaking grasp—a letter addressed to the man whom she had always deemed her parent, and signed by Daniel Clark. She could not read; the words swam before her eyes, but she laid her finger on the signature and said in a low and husky voice, “This name—Daniel Clark—he was my godfather.”
“He was your father!” replied Mr. D. “Read, read for yourself.”
Myra forced her nerves to be still. With desperate resolution she kept her eyes upon the writing. Every word of that letter contained proof that went to her heart. She was the daughter of Daniel Clark.
CHAPTER VI.
She left the parent roof, and left in grief,
Not from an idle passion vain and light,
But in her heart there lived a firm belief,
That duty call’d and honor urged her flight.
Little by little, as her shattered nerves could bear it, the truth was revealed to Myra. It was a sad, sad trial, the uprooting of her pure domestic faith, the tearing asunder of those thousand delicate fibers that had so long woven, and clung, and rooted themselves around the parents who had adopted her. Love them she did, now, as it seemed, more intensely than ever, but there was excitement in her heart, a sort of wild, unsettled feeling, that destroyed all the sweet faith and tranquillity of affection. It was no longer the quiet and serene love which had clung around her from infancy, naturally and without effort, as wild blossoms bud upon a bank where the sunshine sleeps longest—but something of unrest and pain mingled with it all. In the history of her parents she found much to excite her imagination, her deep and sorrowful interest. It opened upon her with all the vividness of a romance, that kindled her fancy, while it pained her to the soul. Then came other thoughts and more thrilling anxieties. The beloved one, the man of her choice, whom she had dreamed of endowing with riches, from which she now seemed legally dispossessed—how would he receive the news of her orphanage—of her dependent state? Alas, how were all her proud and generous visions swept away! And yet, did she doubt his love or his pure disinterestedness? Never for a moment. Loyal, lofty, and unselfish as her own pure heart, she knew the beloved of that heart to be. She felt assured that his faith to the dowerless orphan would be kept more sacred than his pledge to the heiress. Full of this high trust, she wrote to Whitney and told him the whole.
“You sought me,” said the letter, “and loved me as the heiress of great wealth, as the only daughter of a proud and rich man. All at once, as if a flash of lightning had swept across the horizon of my life, revealing the truth with a single fiery gleam, I find myself the orphan of a great and good man, whom I remember only as the shade of a vision—and of a woman, lovely as she has been unfortunate—alive still, but kept from her child by bonds that have yet proved too strong, even for the yearnings of maternal love. I know that Daniel Clark, my father, was supposed to possess great wealth, but I am told that he died insolvent, and that in his will neither wife nor child was mentioned. Therefore am I an orphan, dependent upon those who are strangers to me in blood for the love that shelters me, for the wealth that has hedged me in with comforts from my cradle up. * * * * I am not the person whom you loved—not the person whom, two short days ago, I believed myself to be. Should Myra Clark, orphaned and without inheritance—her very birth loaded with doubt, and her hold on any living thing uncertain—still claim the faith pledged to Myra D., the heiress? No; like the rest, I resign this last and most precious hold on the past. You are free—honorably free, from all responsibility arising from the faith you plighted. Of all my past life, I have nothing left but the simple name of Myra.”