"Go to your room," he ordered sternly. "Tomorrow I will speak with your mother, and we shall then decide what shall be done. Only, understand one thing: in the future you are not my dear daughter that you have been in the past. I—I have no daughter," he added in a voice harsh yet broken by emotion, "for you have now proved yourself an enemy worse even than those who for so many years have taken advantage of my helplessness."
"Ah, dad, dad, you are cruel!" she cried, bursting again into a torrent of tears. "You are too cruel! I have done nothing!"
"Do you call placing me in peril nothing?" he retorted bitterly. "Go to your room at once. Remain with me, Flockart. I want to speak to you."
The girl saw herself convicted by those unfortunate words she had used—words meant in defiance of her arch-enemy Flockart, but which had placed her in ignominy and disgrace. Ah, if she could only stand firm and speak the ghastly truth! But, alas! she dared not. Flockart, the man who held her in his power, the man whom she knew to be her father's bitterest opponent, a cheat and a fraud, stood there triumphant, with a smile upon his lips; while she, pure, honest, and devoted to that afflicted man, was denounced and outcast. She raised her voice in one last word of faint protest.
But her father, angered and grieved, turned fiercely upon her and ordered her from his presence. "Go," he said, "and do not come near me again until your boxes are packed and you are ready to leave Glencardine."
"You speak as though I were a servant whom you've discharged," she said bitterly.
"I am speaking to my enemy, not to my daughter," was his hard response.
She raised her eyes to Flockart, and saw upon his dark face a hard, sphinx-like look. What hope of salvation could she ever expect from that man—the man who long ago had sought to estrange her from her father so that he might work his own ends? It was upon her tongue to turn upon him and relate the whole infamous truth. Yet so friendly had the two men become of late that she feared, even if she did so, that her father would only see in the revelation an attempt at reprisal. Besides, what if Flockart spoke? What if he told the awful truth? Her own dear father, whom she loved so well, even though he had misjudged her, would be dragged into the mire. No, she was the victim of that man, who was a past-master of the art of subterfuge; the man who, for years, had lived by his wits and preyed upon society.
"Leave us, and go to your room," again commanded her father.
She looked sadly at the white, bespectacled countenance which she loved so well. Her soft hand once more sought his; but he cast it from him, saying, "Enough of your caresses! You are no longer my daughter! Leave us!" And then, seeing all protest in vain, she sighed, turned very slowly, and with a last, lingering look upon the helpless man to whom she had been so devoted, and who now so grossly misjudged her, she tottered out, closing the door behind her.