"Oh, my darling! what have I done?" he gasped. "If I had not been so blind I might have spared you all this. You love Lynde Pyne! Great God! what a hideous thing life is after all. I might have known that she would meet them all sooner or later. It is the law of the living. But what was I to do? My poor little one! where is the justice or the mercy in the curse that rests upon your life? To know the truth, with your sensitive nature, would kill you; yet how am I to keep you from finding out? Oh, God! the peace that time had brought is ended, and the bitter agony of her life has begun! If I could but bear it for her!"
He left her side after one more long look, and taking a key that he had brought with him he unlocked an old desk that the room contained. Inside the drawer that opened he pressed a spring, and took from the inner drawer a small portrait.
He looked at the pictured face, then bowed his head upon it, and the bitterest tears of his life fell from his eyes.
"Oh, Lena, Lena!" he sobbed. "Can you look down upon us now and see what your sin is to cost her? I don't want to blame you, my girl, now that you are dead, but what am I to say to her? I wonder if you can see what terrible danger threatens her, and I wonder if you know that it would kill her to know the sin that you committed, and that forever ruins and blasts her life? God forgive me! You are dead now, and perhaps in heaven, but—Lena, Lena, Lena!"
He sat for some time so, then was aroused by feeling a hand laid upon his shoulder. He glanced up, and to his dismay, saw Leonie standing there, her face white as death.
"Who is that woman?" she asked in a voice utterly unlike her own.
Godfrey Cuyler hesitated, his hands shaking until it was almost impossible for him to hold the portrait. He thrust it into the drawer, and locked it before she knew what he was about.
"It is no one that you know!" he cried, brokenly. "If you love me, you will not ask."
She laid her hands upon his shoulders, and held him firmly.
"Dad," she said, slowly, "you are keeping something from me that you have no right to keep. What is it? What has Miss Chandler to do with me? And who is that woman whose picture you have, who looks so much like the portrait in Lynde Pyne's drawer?"