She made no struggle, but her eyes of pain and terror sought the speaker’s face, and saw that he was the man Nogam. In extremity of amazement she spoke his name. He shook his head.
“No longer Nogam,” he said in the same low accents, and smiled—“but your father, Michael Lanyard!”
XIX
UNMASKING
One more instant the girl rested passive in uncomprehending astonishment; then abruptly she exerted herself to break free from the supporting embrace, but found the effort wasted for lack of opposition, so that her own violence sent her reeling away half a dozen paces, to bring up against the desk; while Lanyard, making no move more than to drop his rejected arms, remained where she had left him, and requited her indignant stare with a broken smile of understanding, a smile at once tender, tolerant, and sympathetic, with a little quirk of rueful humour for good measure.
“My father!” Sofia repeated in a gasp of disdain—“you!”
He gave a slight shrug.
“Such, it appears, is your sad fortune.”
“A servant!”
“And not the proud prince you were promised? Rather a come down, one must admit.” Lanyard laughed low, and moved nearer. “I’m sorry, I mean I might be (for myself, too) if Nogam were less a fraud than that pretentious mountebank, Prince Victor—or for the matter of that, if you were as poor of spirit as you would seem on your own valuation, if you were not at heart your mother’s daughter, and mine, my child by a woman whom I loved well, and who long ago loved me!”
He paused deliberately to let her grasp the full sense of his words, then pursued: