“Coira!  Coira!” he cried, and neither of the two knew that he called her for the first time by her name.  “Oh, child,” said he, “how they have lied to you and tricked you!  I might have known, I might have seen it, but I was a blind fool.  I thought—­intolerable things.  I might have known.  They have lied to you most damnably, Coira.”

She stared at him in a breathless silence without movement of any sort.  Only her face seemed to have turned a little whiter and her great eyes darker, so that they looked almost black and enormous in that still face.

He told her, briefly, the truth:  how young Arthur had had frequent quarrels with his grandfather over his waste of money, how after one of them, not at all unlike the others, he had disappeared, and how Captain Stewart, in desperate need, had set afoot his plot to get the lad’s greater inheritance for himself.  He described for her old David Stewart and the man’s bitter grief, and he told her about the will, about how he had begun to suspect Captain Stewart, and of how he had traced the lost boy to La Lierre.  He told her all that he knew of the whole matter, and he knew almost all there was to know, and he did not spare himself even his misconception of the part she had played, though he softened that as best he could.

Midway of his story Mlle. O’Hara bent her head and covered her face with her hands.  She did not cry out or protest or speak at all.  She made no more than that one movement, and after it she stood quite still, but the sight of her, bowed and shamed, stripped of pride, as it had been of garments, was more than the man could bear.

He cried her name, “Coira!” And when she did not look up, he called once more upon her.  He said:  “Coira, I cannot bear to see you stand so.  Look at me.  Ah, child, look at me!  Can you realize,” he cried—­“can you even begin to think what a great joy it is to me to know at last that you have had no part in all this?  Can’t you see what it means to me?  I can think of nothing else.  Coira, look up!”

She raised her white face, and there were no tears upon it, but a still anguish too great to be told.  It would seem never to have occurred to her to doubt the truth of his words.  She said:  “It is I who might have known.  Knowing what you have told me now, it seems impossible that I could have believed.  And Captain Stewart—­I always hated him—­loathed him—­distrusted him.  And yet,” she cried, wringing her hands, “how could I know?  How could I know?”

The girl’s face writhed suddenly with her grief, and she stared up at Ste. Marie with terror in her eyes.  She whispered:  “My father!  Oh, Ste. Marie, my father!  It is not possible.  I will not believe—­he cannot have done this, knowing.  My father, Ste. Marie!”

The man turned his eyes away, and she gave a sobbing cry.

“Has he,” she said, slowly, “done even this for me?  Has he given—­his honor, also—­when everything else was—­gone?  Has he given me his honor, too?  Oh,” she said, “why could I not have died when I was a little child?  Why could I not have done that?  To think that I should have lived to—­bring my father to this!  I wish I had died.  Ste. Marie,” she said, pleading with him.  “Ste. Marie, do you think—­my father—­knew?”