"Please tell me only one thing, and I can bear all else patiently. Was he—was my father—a gentleman? Oh! my mother could never have loved any—but a gentleman."
"His treatment of her and of you would scarcely entitle him to that honourable epithet; yet in the eyes of the world your father assuredly is in every respect a gentleman, is considered even an aristocrat."
She sobbed aloud, and the violence of her emotion, which she seemed unable to control, alarmed him. Leading her to the library door he said, retaining her hand.
"Compose yourself, or you will be really sick. Now that your poor tortured heart is easy, can you not go to sleep?"
"Oh, thank you! Yes, I will try."
"Lily, next time trust me. Trust your guardian in everything.
Good-night. God bless you."
CHAPTER XXV.
"'The dice of the gods are always loaded,' and what appears the merest chance is as inexorably fixed, predetermined, as the rules of mathematics, or the laws of crystallization. What madness to flout fate!"
Mrs. Orme laid down her pen as she spoke, and leaned back in her chair.
"Did you speak to me?" inquired Mrs. Waul, who had been nodding over her worsted work, and was aroused by the sound of the voice.