She looked up at him in swift surprise.
“Is it necessary?”
“I think so,” he answered. “You won't like what I'm going to tell you! You'll think you've been badly treated. So you have! I pledged my word, in a weak hour, with the others. To-day I'm going to break it. I think it best.”
“Well?”
“You've been deceived! You were told always that your father had died in prison. He didn't.”
“What!”
Her sharp cry rang out strangely into the little room. Already he could see signs of the coming storm, and the task which lay before him seemed more hateful than ever.
“Listen,” he said. “I must tell you some things which you know in order to explain others which you do not know. Your father was a younger son born of extravagant parents, virtually penniless and without the least capacity for earning money. I don't blame him—who could? I couldn't earn money myself. If I hadn't got it I daresay that I should go to the bad as he did.”
The girl's lips tightened, and she drew a little breath through her teeth. Davenant hesitated.
“You know all about that company affair. Of course they made your father the butt of the whole thing, although he was little more than a tool. He was sent to prison for seven years. You were only a child then and your mother was dead. Well, when the seven years were up, your relations and mine too, Ernestine, concocted what I have always considered an ill-begotten and a miserably selfish plot. Your father, unfortunately, yielded to them, for your sake. You were told that he had died in prison. He did not. He lived through his seven years there, and when he came out did so in another name and went abroad on the morning of the day of his liberation.”