It was an attack for which the doctor was not fully prepared. He faltered for an instant and his cheek grew livid, but he almost immediately recovered himself, and with even more than his former dignity, answered shortly:
“Now you are more than impertinent, you are insolent. I do not need to have secret reasons for repudiating any claims you may make to being Polly Earle’s father. Your face denies the identity you usurp. You have not a trait of the man you call yourself. Your eyes——”
“Oh, do not malign my eyes,” laughed the stranger. “They are faded I know and one lid has got a way of drooping of late years, which has greatly altered my expression. But they are the same eyes, doctor, that watched with you beside the bed of Huldah Earle and if they fail to meet you with just the same mixture of trembling hope and fear as they did then it is because youthful passions die out with the years and I no longer greatly care for any verdict you may have to give.”
A frown hard to fathom corrugated the doctor’s forehead and he continued to survey in silence the bold face that declined to blench before him.
“So you persist—” he remarked at length. “Then you are a villain as well as an impostor.”
“Villain or impostor, I am at least Ephraim Earle,” asserted the other; adding as he noted the doctor’s fingers tighten on the slight stick he carried, “Oh, you need not show your hatred quite so plainly, Dr. Izard. I do not hate you, whatever cause I may have to do so. Have I not said that my old passions are dried up, and even signified that my coming back was but a whim? Curraghven-hoodah, Oswald, you weary me with your egotism. Let us shake hands and be comrades once more.”
The audacity, the superiority even, with which these words were said, together with the cabalistic phrase he used—a phrase which Dr. Izard was ready to swear even at that moment of shock and confusion, was one known only to himself and Polly’s father,—had such an effect upon him that he reeled and surveyed the speaker with something of superstitious fear and horror. But at the malicious gleam which this momentary weakness called up in the eye of his antagonist, he again regained his self-command, and stepping firmly up to him, he vociferated with stern emphasis:
“I repeat that you are an impostor. I do not know you, nor do I know your name. You say you are Ephraim Earle, but that is a lie. I knew that man too well to be deceived by you. You have neither his eyes, his mouth, nor his voice, I will say nothing of his manners.”
“Oh,” spoke up a voice from behind, “he looks like Ephraim Earle. You cannot say he does not look like Ephraim Earle.”
The doctor turned sharply, but his antagonist, who neither seemed to ask nor need the support of any one or anything but his own audacity, responded with a mocking leer: