"What!"
That name had power to arouse Leonie from a lethargy as none other had.
She sprung to her feet, but as she caught sight of Godfrey Cuyler's face, she sunk back again with a low sob of anguish.
"He was the uncle of the man who was your employer," he continued, the effort to speak growing more painful with each moment. "He fell in love with her. Believing that poverty was the only disgrace that attached to her, Roger Pyne called upon her and proposed marriage. Leonie, she was starving. She was so bitterly alone, so helpless, there was none near to guide her in the right path, every hope had been taken out of her life—— Oh, what shall I say to make you see her fault in a merciful light? God knows how hard it is to resist a temptation like that! She knew that if he knew the story of her life he would never marry her, and to her the protection he offered meant heaven. Leonie, Leonie, she married him, never telling him the history of her life, or that she had a living husband in the penitentiary!"
"My God!"
The exclamation fell like ice from the cold lips, but the expression of Leonie's face did not alter.
"A week later he discovered all," the old man went on dully. "In his terrible anger he cast her off without a penny; he went to Europe and left her here to starve. For several months she lived the same way that she had done before, barely keeping soul and body together; then you were born! I can never tell you what it was after that. Mrs. Chandler was also in Europe. Lena wrote to me many times, but the letters never reached me, and at last starvation came! She saw you dying before her very eyes, dying for want of food, and she unable to help you.
"Made desperate by her terrible extremity, she rushed out into the street and snatched a purse from a man. It contained only twenty little pitiful dollars, not one of which she had used; but she was arrested, tried, as her husband had been, and—God! how can I say it?—was convicted. I read the story in the papers. How I ever lived to reach her is more than I can tell. There were no extenuating circumstances printed, she was poor and friendless. There was no mention made of her marriage to Roger Pyne, but only the cold story of her crime. Oh, Leonie, my child—— But what is the use in attempting to tell you what I suffered? No words could ever describe it. I reached her in time to see her die, to hear her story, to have you confided to my care, and that was all. She died in the Tombs prison. It took all the soul out of my body, but I knew that I must live for your sake. I could not go back again to my old home, where everything reminded me of her, and so I settled here in this great city, where no man knows his neighbors' business or cares to know. As I watched you grow, the same love that I had given to Lena I felt for you. Then the desire that grew to mania came that you might never know of the shadow upon your birth. Oh, how I prayed that you might be spared that; and now—Leonie——"
There was another gasp for breath, a wild clutching at the collar, and for the first time Leonie saw. She sprung to her feet and seized his hand wildly.
"Dad," she gasped—"dad! in Heaven's name what is the matter?"