When she first began to speak she gasped and panted, but as she went on she gained more command over her voice.
Julia Legg was full of pity for this ungracious creature, and she came and knelt down beside her husband’s chair, and took his daughter’s hand in hers and kissed it, murmuring softly:
“Believe me, oh! believe me! I will do all in my power to lighten any trouble you may have, and to make you comfortable and contented, if not happy.”
Lamia—as we must continue to call her because that is the name by which the reader has known her from the first—Lamia drew her hand away from the kindly hands that clasped it, and Julia Legg, with a sigh, arose and resumed her seat.
“My own dear daughter, before I tell you anything more I must remind you again that in my heart and in my home you have a haven of peace and love, of rest and safety from all the storms of life. Do you not know and feel this, my daughter?”
“Oh, yes; you are my father, and that is understood,” she answered coldly, as if a parent’s boundless love, pity and forgiveness were such mere matters of course that they needed no recognition. “But I wish you would tell me at once, and be done with it. What has my miserable husband, Randolph Hay, done?” she demanded.
John Legg sighed deeply. He did not think “how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” because he had never seen the lines, but he sighed more than once as he answered:
“In the first place, my daughter, your miserable husband, as you call him, is not Randolph Hay, and has not a shadow of a right to that name or to the estate of Haymore.”
Lamia started up and looked her father in the face.
“Who and what is he, then?” she fiercely demanded.