As I sat reading in my room, upon the second morning after I had dispatched my answer to Mr Cribbs, of Carey Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, I was roused by a knock at the inner door. I requested my visitor to walk in. He did so.—Rupert Sinclair, and his child, stood before me!
I was fearfully shocked. He looked, indeed, more like a ghost than a living man. Fifty years of pain and anxiety seemed written on a brow that had not numbered thirty summers. His eye was sunk, his cheek was very wan and pallid. There was no expression in his countenance; he stood perfectly passionless and calm. The little girl was a lovely creature. A sickening sensation passed through me as I mentally compared her lineaments with those of the joyous creature whom I had met in Bath, and then referred to those of the poor father, so altered, so wofully and so wonderfully changed! She clung to that father with a fondness that seemed to speak of his desertion, and of his reliance upon her for all his little happiness. I was taken by surprise; I knew not what to do; the memory of past years rushed back upon me. I saw him helpless and forsaken. I could not bid him from my door; I could not speak an unkind word.
I placed a chair before the man, whose strength seemed scarce sufficient to support its little burden.
"Sinclair," I exclaimed, "you are ill!"
"I am!" he answered. "Very ill; worse than I had feared. They tell me I must leave the country, and seek milder air. I shall do so shortly; for her sake, not my own."
The little Alice put her delicate and alabaster hand about her parent's face, and patted it to express her gratitude or warm affection. My heart bled in spite of me.
"You refused to meet me, Wilson," said Sinclair quietly.
I blushed to think that I had done so; for I forgot every thing in the recollection of past intimacy, and in the consciousness of what I now beheld. I made no answer.
"You refused to meet me," he repeated. "You did me injustice. I know your thoughts, your cruel and unkind suspicions. I have come to remove them. Walter, you have cursed my name; you shall live to pity my memory."
"Rupert," I stammered, "whatever I may have thought or done, I assert that I have not willingly done you injustice. I have"——