"Love her! When he had treated her like that! What did he understand by love?"
"This is a curious world, and men contain, in themselves, the most singular contradictions. I doubt if he had ever ceased to love her, even when he was most bitter against her; more, I believe that it was because he loved her so much that he was so bitter. Can't you understand how that might be?"
"I think--I think I can."
"It was for love of her he died."
"How--how can that be?"
"It was so. He was an old man before his time. Each year his constitution failed more and more. During one of his periodic attacks of bad health, when his strength was at its lowest ebb, he came upon some papers, of whose very existence, by one of those diabolical mischances which Fortune loves to deal us, he had been ignorant, through all those years. They were some letters of your mother's; and they proved, even to him, what an injustice he had done her. The shock killed him. They found him dead, with her letters in his hand. Had he cared nothing for her he would have been little moved by the discovery of her written words; but his heart had been breaking for years; the revelation of how unjust he had been to her broke it altogether. That is why I say that, for love of her, he died."
"Poor father!"
"Yes; you may well say that also; it was 'poor father' as well as 'poor mother'--life's little ironies! His history was one of the strangest with which I have been personally acquainted. Not the least strange part of it is the fact that, not long before he died, he would persist in embarking in what seemed to me to be some wild-cat speculations, which, by an astounding series of accidents, turned out amazingly well; with the result that, though he had been a needy man for years, at the moment of his death he was actually rich. His will was found written on one side of a sheet of notepaper. It was dated only a few weeks before the end; so that he must have drawn it up as soon as he learnt that a turn of Fortune's wheel had brought him wealth. By it he left every farthing he possessed to you, absolutely, to do with it what you choose. So that--you're an heiress."
The girl's glance had never once left his face; it was as if she had been trying to read on it more than his words conveyed. Now she stared at him with amazement in her eyes.
"But--I don't understand. When Mr Emmett came to the convent he said that my father had not left a penny; that he had died owing him a large sum of money, and that it was only out of charity he paid what the Sisters were owed."