“What then?”

“The man on whose neck I hung was my own father.”

“It was Desborough!” said the youth, with an air and in a voice of extreme anguish.

“It was,” returned Matilda, her face crimsoning as she reluctantly acknowledged the parentage.  “But how knew you it?”

“Behold the proof,” exclaimed Gerald, with uncontrollable bitterness, as he drew from his bosom the portrait of a child which, from its striking resemblance, could be taken for no other than her to whom he now presented it.

“This is indeed mine,” said Matilda, mournfully.  “It was taken for me, as I have since understood, in the very year when I was laid an orphan and a stranger at the door of that good man, who calling himself my uncle, has been to me through life a more than father.  Thank God,” she pursued with greater animation, her large dark eyes upturned, and sparkling through the tears that forced themselves upwards, “thank, God he at least lives not to suffer through the acts of his adopted child.  Where got you this, Gerald?” she proceeded, when after a short struggle she had succeeded in overcoming her emotion.

Gerald, who in his narrative of events, had purposely omitted all mention of Desborough, now detailed the occurrence at the hut, and concluded what the reader already knows, by stating that he had observed and severed from the settler, as he slept heavily on the floor, the portrait in question, which, added to the previous declaration of Matilda as to the obscurity of her birth, connected with other circumstances on board his gun boat, on his trip to Buffalo, had left an impression little short of certainty that he was indeed the father of the woman whom he so wildly loved.

For some minutes after this explanation there was a painful silence, which neither seemed anxious to interrupt—­at length Gerald asked.

“But what had a circumstance, so capable of explanation, to do with the breaking off of your engagement, Matilda, or, did he, more proud—­perhaps I should say less debased—­than myself, shrink from uniting his fate with the daughter of a murderer?”

“True,” said Matilda, musingly; “you have said, I think, that he slew your father.  This thirst for revenge then would seem hereditary.  That is the only, because it is the noblest, inheritance I would owe to such a being.”

“But your affair with your lover, Matilda—­how terminated that?” demanded Gerald—­with increasing paleness, and in a faltering tone.

“In his falsehood and my disgrace.  Early the next morning I sent to him, and bade him seek me in the temple at the usual hour.  He came, but it was only to blast my hopes—­ to disappoint the passion of the woman who doated upon him.  He accused me of a vile intercourse with a slave, and almost maddened me with ignoble reproaches.  It was in vain that I swore to him most solemnly, the man he had seen was my father; a being whom motives