"Why are you so angry?" she asked piteously.
"Why?" he echoed, "why?" and then bringing his clenched fist down upon the document of many folios, "because I had built all my hopes on you—because I had speculated and hoarded, and calculated and thought, in order to amass a mighty fortune for you and your heirs. I would have made you a Duchess, girl. Yes, by Heaven, I had negotiations in hand with a ducal house, and you would have been taken to town a few weeks hence to be courted by the heir to a dukedom. I should have lived to see my daughter mistress of half a dozen palaces—"
"Not your daughter, sir," said Herrick gravely; "your daughter has long been mistress of one narrow house—a tenement which none would care to dispute with her."
"What are you raving about, fellow?"
The Squire started to his feet, and looked at Durnford in a kind of savage bewilderment.
"I am here to reveal the trick that has been played upon you, sir, and to justify myself as a man of honour," answered Herrick. "I stole no heiress when I took this dear girl from beneath your roof. I counselled no disobedience to a father when I urged her to fly with me. I speculated upon no future fortune, hoped nothing from your relenting bounty. The girl I loved was a nameless waif who for thirteen years has been imposed upon you as a daughter, and who loves you and reverences you as truly as if she were indeed your child."
"Not my daughter?" muttered the Squire; "not my daughter? It is a foul lie—a lie hatched by you, sir, to cozen and torment me—an outrageous, obvious, shallow, impudent lie!"
"Should I invent a lie which deprives my wife of any claim to your wealth? However indifferent I may be to riches, I am too much a man of the world to so wantonly sacrifice my wife's prospects."
"Upon what grounds?" cried Bosworth. "What proof?" And then suddenly gripping Irene by the arm, "Unfasten your bodice, girl. Let me see your right shoulder."
He almost tore the upper part of the bodice from the fair and dimpled shoulder in his furious impatience, and there at the top of the arm was revealed a deep cicatrice, the scar of a wound healed long ago.