Could any torture more horrible than the knowledge of that fact be poured out upon him?
Yet he saw that she did not credit the story—ay, it seemed too wild for any one to credit. But he knew it was true.
He put his arm around her and led her to a seat.
“My darling—my darling!” he cried, in a voice of despair, “can we ever bear it? I thought our sorrows were all at an end; they have but just begun. God give us both strength to bear it.”
“Earle,” she said, with a piteous look into his quivering face, “you do not believe what he has said? Oh!” clasping her hands with a frightened look, “just think what it means, if it should be true. You do not believe it, Earle?”
He bowed his head until his forehead touched her golden hair, and groaned aloud.
“My darling, I believe the knowledge will kill me, but I know that it is true,” he said, in a hoarse and unnatural voice.
She shrank from his sheltering arm with a cry that rang in his ears for years.
Folding his arms tight across his breast, as if to keep his hands from performing a swift and terrible vengeance, Earle instantly turned and faced the man who owned himself his father.
“You know it, do you?” Mr. Dalton said, before he could speak. “You own the relationship, then? You know all your mother’s story, and how she cheated me, and kept me from the knowledge of who she was, the position she occupied, and the great wealth she was to inherit some day? If she had told me, I should to-day have been the father of the Marquis of Wycliffe, and occupying one of the proudest positions in England. I would have married her honorably if she had told me, but she cheated me out of a magnificent fortune, and I stand here to-day a ruined man, a beggar. Do you wonder that I hated you, for her sake, when I found out who you were? Do you wonder that I have always hated Marion Vance for defrauding me thus?”