She knew it was her father’s custom to spend long hours in his library, sometimes far into the gray dawn.  He found this preferable to the presence of his sharp-tongued second wife, who was always nagging him for more money, or to put his property into her name as proof positive of his unbounded, undying affection for her.

In his library, among his books, there was no nagging.  Here he found peace, silence and quiet.

Therefore, toward the library, late as the hour was, Faynie made her way, stealing along quietly as a shadow.

The door stood slightly ajar, and a ray of light, a narrow, thread-like strip, fell athwart the dim corridor.

When Faynie reached the door she paused, trembling with apprehension, a feeling of intense dread, like a presentiment of coming evil, stealing over her like the shadow of doom.

She was prepared for his bitter anger, for the whirlwind of wrath that would be sure to follow, but she would cast herself on her knees at his feet, and with head bowed, oh, so lowly, so piteously, wait for the hurricane of his rage to exhaust itself.  Then she would bend over her head still lower, her pride crushed, her pitiful humiliation complete, and sue on her bended knees, with her hands clasped for his pardon and his love again.

She would plead for it for the sake of the fair, hapless young mother whom she had loved and lost in his early youth.  Surely, for her sake he would find mercy, perhaps pardon, for the child she had left behind her, the fair, petted, hapless daughter, who had been so lonely, and whose heart yearned so for love ever since he had brought in a second wife to rule over his household.

Ay, from that hour he and his daughter had seemed to drift apart.

Nerving herself for the ordeal, the girl crept to the door and timidly swung it back.

There was a figure bending over the writing desk; not the tall form of her father, but her stepmother.

Faynie drew back with a startled cry.

In a single instant, with the swiftness of a lioness, the woman who had been examining the desk, cleared the space that divided her from the girl, and clutched her by the shoulder.

“You!” she panted, in a voice that was scarcely human, it was so full of venomous hatred.  “You!” she repeated, flinging the girl from her, as though she had been something vile to the touch.  “How dare you come here?”

Faynie looked at her for a moment with dilated eyes gazing out from her pale face.

Had her stepmother suddenly gone mad? was the thought that flashed through the girl’s brain.

“I—­I have come back to my father, and—­and to his home—­and mine.  Any explanation I have to offer will be made to him alone.”

The woman laughed a sneering, demoniac laugh, and her clutch on the girl’s shoulder grew stronger, fiercer.

“How lovely, how beautifully worded, how dutiful!” she sneered.  “By that I judge that you have not been keeping abreast of the times, or you would have known, girl, that your father is dead, and that he has disinherited you, leaving every dollar of his wealth to me.”