"My dear friend, I wish that you would not press the subject."
"Answer me; I must know! The bitterest truth could not exceed my suspicions!" almost raved Mr. Clarke in his eagerness, and again the clinched hands of the listener tightened as if they were about his throat.
Hate, swift, terrible, murderous, had sprung to life, full grown in the angry girl's heart.
She heard the old doctor cough and sigh again, and a futile wish rose in her that he had dropped down dead before he ever came to Cliffdene.
Doctor Jay, all unconscious of her proximity and her charitable wishes, proceeded hesitatingly:
"Since you insist, I must own the truth. Nurse Jenks deceived me."
"How?" hoarsely.
"She never went near the foundling asylum. She had at her own home an infant, the child of a worthless daughter, who had run away previously to go on the stage. Leaving this child on her mother's hands, the actress again ran away, and the old grandmother palmed it off on you as a foundling."
"My God! I see it all," groaned Edmund Clarke. "The old fiend exchanged infants, putting her grandchild in the place of my daughter, and raising her in poverty and wretchedness. I have seen my child with her, my beautiful daughter. Listen to my story," he cried, pouring out to the astonished old physician the whole moving story of Liane Lester.