"Father!" she breathed.
"Then you heard—"
"All!"
The emotion proved too much for the sufferer. He felt his head swim, and believed that the final vertigo had come.
"Only one moment!" he murmured, as though demanding respite of the destructive forces of nature; "Frank must know—"
"Frank already knows that he is the true Lord Mowbray," whispered Esther.
"But the proofs!" pursued Lebeau; "the proofs are necessary. The nurse, Elizabeth Hughes, still lives—at Bangor—in Wales. She will give all the necessary evidence.—Elizabeth Hughes—do not forget!"
He was exhausted with so much speech. His aching eyes had lost their circumspection. Gropingly his hand sought the fair head of his daughter and rested there. Then his thoughts fled backward over forty long years. Again he saw the humble peasant's cot in the mountains of Dauphiné, whence he had set out to see the world. We saw a dying woman lying upon her bed,—his mother! Her faltering hand was laid upon his boyish head, pressing it gently, tenderly. All the remainder of his existence had vanished; all that remained was the Alpha and Omega; an utter void united that caress received and this caress given. It was a foretaste of that world where there is no reckoning of time, where moments are as ages, where thoughts and acts are lost in one eternal present.
Entering noiselessly, Levet passed here and there about the room upon tiptoe. Lebeau realized all that took place, but the power of perception had abandoned him.
"Are you there, doctor?" he asked.