His eyes rested on the certificate which bore Pluma’s name, also his own. He tore it into a thousand shreds.
“It is all over between us now,” he cried. “Even if Daisy were dead, I could never take the viper to my bosom that has dealt me such a death-stinging blow. If living, I shall search the world over till I find her; if dead, I shall consecrate my life to the memory of my darling, my pure, little, injured only love.”
He heard a low rap at the door. The servant never forgot the young man’s haggard, hopeless face as he delivered Basil Hurlhurst’s message.
“Ah, it is better so,” cried Rex to himself, vehemently, as the man silently and wonderingly closed the door. “I will go to him at once, and tell him I shall never marry his daughter. Heaven help me! I will tell him all.”
Hastily catching up the letter, Rex walked, with a firm, quick tread, toward the study, in which the strangest tragedy which was ever enacted was about to transpire.
“I am your mother, Pluma,” repeated the woman, slowly. “Look into my face, and you will see every lineament of your own mirrored there. But for me you would never have enjoyed the luxuries of Whitestone Hall, and this is the way you repay me! Is there no natural instinct in your heart that tells you you are standing in your mother’s presence?”
“Every instinct in my heart tells me you are a vile impostor, woman. I wonder that you dare intimate such a thing. You are certainly an escaped lunatic. My mother was lost at sea long years ago.”
“So every one believed. But my very presence here is proof positive such was not the case.”