The man shivered at her words. He was but a miserable shadow of the John Hungerford of ten years ago. His form was shrunken, his clothing faded and worn, his face was pale, his cheeks hollow, and his eyes sunken and lusterless.
"But, Helen, I want to see Dorothy—she is my child. I must see her!" he faltered, a note of agonized appeal in his tones that ended abruptly in a hoarse, hollow cough.
"You must not see her!" Helen emphatically returned, and thinking only of shielding Dorothy from the pain and shame of such a meeting.
Her words and her apparent indifference to the uncontrollable yearning within him seemed to anger him.
"She is as much my child as she is yours," he shot back, with a flash of his old-time doggedness.
Helen flushed an indignant scarlet.
"As much your child as she is mine!" she scathingly exclaimed. "You claim that! You, who deserted us both; who robbed her of her little fortune, and left me in poverty to rear and educate her as best I could, while you wasted your stolen thousands upon that woman and your degrading and sinful pleasures! Your child! What have you ever done for her that entitles you to make the shameless boast?"
The man cringed abjectly beneath her words, but made no attempt to reply, and Helen resumed, her indignation still at the boiling point:
"I have spent my life for her; I have spared nothing to give her every advantage, to make her a noble, cultured woman, and to shield her from every sorrow. During the last ten years of her life she has known nothing but happiness; she has married a good man, and a gentleman in every sense of the word. He is prosperous, and belongs to a much-respected and well-known family here in New York. So Dorothy's future is very promising, and I will never allow you to cast a shadow upon it, or mar her joy in any way."
Her listener shifted uncomfortably in his chair.