"Then you find that age has not drawn the fangs from the old crippled Darrington lion, nor clipped his claws?"
The sneer curved his white mustache, until she saw the outline of the narrow, bloodless underlip.
"That king of beasts scorns to redden his fangs, or flesh his claws, in the quivering body of his own offspring. Your metaphor is an insult to natural instincts."
She laid the letter once more before him, and looked down on him, with ill-concealed aversion.
"Who are you? By what right dare you intrude upon me?"
"I am merely a sorrowful, anxious, poverty-stricken woman, whose heart aches over her mother's sufferings and vho would never have endured the humiliation of this interview, except to deliver a letter in the hope of prolonging my mother's life."
"You do not mean that you are—my—"
"I am nothing to you, sir, but the bearer of a letter from your dying daughter."
"You cannot be the child of—of Ellice?"
After the long limbo of twenty-three years, the name burst from him, and with what a host of memories its echo peopled the room, where that erring daughter had formerly reigned queen of his heart.