“You are good,” she said.
“Am I, darling? Oh, I should like to be! If my little baby had lived perhaps I should have been, though everybody has been bad to me. No one has ever loved me, as you do, before.”
“Your little child loves you,” was the quiet answer, still with that look and tone of knowledge.
“Oh, do you think she does, and that I will some time have her again?”
“Yes,” said the child, with a certainty that seemed to make doubt unreasonable. Then looking around, as if in sudden recollection, she said, “Clem—Boy—come here.”
At these words a lingering hope sprang up in Rhodes’s heart. This strange mode of addressing him might enable him to keep his secret still. If he could only get the child away now, and to-morrow contrive some way of accounting for her! With this end in view he came forward, the child turning on him, as he did so, the fond, penetrating look he knew so well.
The dancer glanced quickly from one to the other, but it was the child she questioned, and not the man.
“Is he your father?” she said.
“Yes,” said Clementina. “My mother died when I was very little. He has been so good to me.”
But what was the matter with Clementina’s voice, and why was her breath suddenly so short and difficult? Rhodes was conscious of this, even in that moment when he realized that his secret was revealed, and his hopes of the Tarara blasted. She was conscious of it, too, and her face took on a sudden look of terror.