He made no answer. His head was bowed on his hands, his face hidden. Queenie looked at him and saw with a sudden sharp pang how strangely his clustering locks had whitened in the past year. She raised herself up and threw her arms around him, laying her cheek against his shoulder.
"Papa," she whispered, mournfully, "look up—I will tell you all—but only to you, you alone, dearest and best of fathers—can I reveal the terrible secret that has ruined my life!"
With her cheek against his shoulder and her hand locked in his, Queenie Lyle poured forth in burning words the story of that missing year—the saddest story to which her father had ever listened—yet he made no comment, uttered no word, until she had finished and thrown herself down at his feet with the wailing cry:
"Papa, can you ever forgive me?"
He did not try to lift her up as she lay there. He only said in a deep, intense voice, with a lightning flash in his deep eyes:
"Queenie, you have forgotten to tell me one thing—his name."
She shuddered from head to foot.
"Papa, it is the only thing I must keep from you—that hated name! What matters it? Is he not beyond the reach of your vengeance?"
"True, true," he answered with a strong shudder. "Oh, Queenie, my poor child, would to God I had died before this terrible thing came upon me!"
She crept nearer him and rested her bowed head on his knee, all her glorious, golden tresses sweeping to the floor.