Twice Beryl walked the length of the room, but each time the recollection of her mother’s tearful, suffering countenance, and the extremity of her need, drove her back to the chair.

“If you knew that your daughter’s life hung by a thread, would you deliberately take a pair of shears and cut it?”

He glared at her in silence, and leaning forward on the table, pushed roughly aside a salver, on which stood a decanter and two wine glasses.

“I am here to tell you a solemn truth; then my responsibility ends.  Your daughter’s life rests literally in your hands; for unless you consent to furnish the money to pay for a surgical operation, which may restore her health, she will certainly die.  I am indulging in no exaggeration to extort alms.  In this letter is the certificate of a distinguished physician, corroborating my statement.  If you, the author of her being, prefer to hasten her death, then your choice of an awful revenge must be settled between your hardened conscience and your God.”

“You are bold indeed, to beard me in my own house, and tell me to my face what no man would dare to utter.”

His voice was an angry pant, and he struck his clenched hand on the table with a force that made the glasses jingle, and the sherry dance in the decanter.

“Yes, you scarcely realize how much bravery this painful errand demands; but the tender love in a woman’s heart nerves her to bear fiery ordeals, that vanquish a man’s courage.”

“Then you find that age has not drawn the fangs from the old crippled Darrington lion, nor clipped his claws?”

The sneer curved his white mustache, until she saw the outline of the narrow, bloodless underlip.

“That king of beasts scorns to redden his fangs, or flesh his claws, in the quivering body of his own offspring.  Your metaphor is an insult to natural instincts.”

She laid the letter once more before him, and looked down on him, with ill-concealed aversion.

“Who are you?  By what right dare you intrude upon me?”

“I am merely a sorrowful, anxious, poverty-stricken woman, whose heart aches over her mother’s sufferings and vho would never have endured the humiliation of this interview, except to deliver a letter in the hope of prolonging my mother’s life.”

“You do not mean that you are—­my—­”

“I am nothing to you, sir, but the bearer of a letter from your dying daughter.”

“You cannot be the child of—­of Ellice?”

After the long limbo of twenty-three years, the name burst from him, and with what a host of memories its echo peopled the room, where that erring daughter had formerly reigned queen of his heart.

“Yes, Ellice is my dear mother’s name.”

He stared at the majestic form, and at the faultless face looking so proudly down upon him, as from an inaccessible height; and she heard him draw his breath, with a labored hissing sound.