"That I am your father—yes, my precious Vera," he answers, pressing a father's holy kiss on the sweet, wistful lips.
Her dark, dreamy eyes look searchingly up into the handsome, noble face.
"Ah, I am so glad," she murmurs, "and you are good and true and noble. I cannot understand why you went away from mamma, but I can tell by your face that you are not the bad and wicked wretch that woman pretended."
"Mrs. Cleveland?" he asks, a spasm of rage and hatred distorting his pallid features.
"Perhaps it will be best not to excite the young lady by talking to her just at first," the sexton interposes, anxiously and respectfully. "She must be very weak, having taken no nourishment for so long. I will go out and prepare a little warm broth for her."
"You must lie still and rest, darling," Lawrence Campbell whispers, pouring a little more of the stimulant between her pale lips—paler now from exhaustion than they were when she lay sleeping in the coffin, and with a faint sigh of assent she closes her eyes and lies silent, while the sexton goes out on his kindly meant errand.
The moments pass, Lawrence Campbell sits still with his head bowed moodily on his hand, his thoughts strangely blended, joy for his daughter's recovery, despairing grief for his wife's loss, and unutterable hate for Marcia Cleveland all mixed inextricably together. All that he has lost by that woman's perjury rushes bitterly over him. In the stillness, broken only by the crackle of the fresh coals upon the fire, and the monotonous ticking of the clock upon the mantel, he broods over his wrongs until they assume gigantic proportions.
And Vera—so strangely rescued from the coffin and the grave—she is very silent also, but none the less is her brain active and her mind busy. One by one she is gathering up the links of memory.
Her strange marriage, her mother's death, her terrible defeat in the triumph she had anticipated over the Clevelands—all come freshly over her memory, with that crowning hour in which wounded to the heart and filled with a deadly despair, she had crept away to die because she could not endure the humiliation and shame of the knowledge she had gained.
"I remember it all now; I could not decide upon the right vial, and by chance I took the wrong one. It was the sleeping potion. How long have I been asleep, and how came I here?"