"A gentleman? I do not see gentlemen, when Madame is out, at this hour of the night. It is ten o'clock. Tell him to come to-morrow."

"I did, miss. He said to-morrow wouldn't do. He asked me to mention 'Beechfield' to you, miss, and to say that he came from America."

"Old or young, Mary?" The color was leaving Cynthia's face.

"Old, miss. He has white hair and black eyes, and looks like a sort of superior working-man."

Cynthia deliberated. Mary watched her in silence, and then made a low-voiced suggestion.

"There's cook's young man in the kitchen, miss, and he's a policeman.

Shall I ask him to step up to the front and tell the man to move on?"

"Oh, no, no!" said Cynthia, suddenly shrinking. "I will see the man, Mary. I think that perhaps he knows a place--some people that I used to know."

There was a sort of terror in her face. Mary turned rather reluctantly to the door.

"Shall I come in too, miss, or shall I stand in the passage?"

"Neither," said Cynthia, with a little laugh. "Go down to your supper, Mary, and I will manage the visitor. Show him in here."

She seemed so composed once more that Mary was reassured. The girl went back to the hall door, and Cynthia rose to her feet with the look of one who was nerving herself for some terrible ordeal. She kept her eyes upon the door; but, when the visitor appeared, they were so dim with agitation that she could hardly see the face or the features of the man whom Mary decorously announced as--

"Mr. Reuben Dare."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Cynthia looked round at her visitor with a sort of timidity which she did not often exhibit. He was apparently about sixty years of age, broad-shouldered, and muscularly built, but with a stiffness of gait which seemed to be either the result of chronic rheumatism or of an accident which had partially disabled him. His face was brown, his eyes were dark and bright; but his hair and beard were almost white, although his eyebrows had not a grizzled tint. He was roughly but respectably dressed, and looked like a prosperous yeoman or an artisan of the better class. Cynthia glanced at him keenly, then seemed to gain confidence, and asked him to sit down. The visitor obeyed; but Cynthia continued standing, with her hands on the back of a heavy chair.

"Mr. Reuben Dare?" she said at length, as the old man did not speak.

"Come straight from Ameriky," said he--he sat bolt-upright on his chair, and looked at the girl with a steady interest and curiosity which almost embarrassed her--"and promised to look you up as soon as I got over here. Can you guess who 'twas I promised, missy?"

Cynthia grew first red and then white.

"No," she said; "I am not sure that I can."

"Is there nobody belonging to you that you haven't heard of for years and years?"

"Yes," said Cynthia; "I think perhaps there is."

"A man," said Mr. Reuben Dare, leaning forward with his hands on his knees, and trying to subdue his rather harsh voice to quietness--"a man as was related to you, maybe?"

"If you will say what you mean, I think I can answer you better," said Cynthia.

"Do you think I am going to say what I mean until I know what sort of a young woman you are, and how you'll take the news I bring you?" said the man.

With a somewhat savage and truculent air he drew his eyebrows down over his eyes as he spoke; but there was a touch of something else as well--of stirred emotion, of doubt, of troubled feeling--which dissipated Cynthia's fears at once. She left the chair which she had been grasping with one hand, and came closer to her visitor.

"I see that you are afraid to trust me," she said quickly. "You think that perhaps I am hard and worldly, and do not want to have anything to do with my relatives? That is not true. You are thinking--speaking--of my poor father perhaps. As long as I was a child--a mere girl--I did not think much about him, I was content to believe what people told me--not that he was guilty--I never believed that!--but that I could do nothing for him, and that I had better not interfere. When I was independent and beginning to think for myself--about six months ago--I found out what I might have done. Shall I go on to tell you what I did?"

"Yes, yes--go on!" The man's voice was husky; his wrinkled hand trembled as it lay upon his knee. He watched the girl's face with hungry eyes.

"I wrote to the Governor of the prison," said Cynthia, "and told him that I had only just discovered--having been such a child--that I could write to my father or see him at regular intervals, and that I should like to do so from time to time. He asked me in return how it was that an intimation--which had been forwarded, I believe, to certain persons interested in my welfare--of my father's fate had not been given to me.

My father had, by a desperate effort, succeeded in escaping from Portland; he had never been recaptured; and, from certain information received, the authorities believed that he was dead. He added however that he had a shrewd suspicion that Andrew Westwood had thrown dust into the eyes of the police, had left the country, and was not dead at all."

"And begged you to communicate with the authorities if you heard from him, I suppose?"

"No; he did not go so far as that to the man's own daughter," said Cynthia calmly. "And it would, of course, have been useless if he had."

"Why--why?"

"Because," said the girl, her lips suddenly trembling and her eyes filling with tears--"because I love my father, and would do anything in the world for him--if he would let me. Can you not tell me where he is?

I would give all I have to see him once again!"

Reuben Dare fidgeted in his chair, and half turned his face away. Then, without meeting her eager tearful eyes, he replied half sullenly--

"The Governor was right. He got away--away to America."

"Oh, then he is living still? He is well?"

"Oh, yes--he's living, and well enough! He hasn't done so badly neither.

He got some land and 'struck ile,' as they say in America; and living under another name, and nobody knowing anything about him--he--well, he's had fair luck."

"And you come from him--you are a friend of his? Did he want to hear of me?"

"Yes, missy, he did. But he would scarce ha' known you if he'd met you in the street--you, grown so tall and handsome and dressed so fine. It was your name as gave him the clue--'Cynthia'--'Cynthia West'; for he read in the papers as you were singing at concerts, and he says to himself, 'Why, that's my gal, sure enough; and she hain't forgotten her mother's name!'"

"Go on!" said Cynthia quickly.

"Go on? What do you mean?" asked Reuben Dare, a little suspiciously.

"There's nothing more to say, is there? And he asked me to make inquiries while I was in England--that was all."

"Oh, no, that was not all!" said Cynthia, drawing nearer, and holding out her hands a little, like one under hypnotic influence, fascinated by a power over which she had no control. "I can tell you the rest. The more he thought of his child, and the more he remembered how she used to love him and trust in him, the more he felt that he could not stay away from her; and so, although the risk was great--terrible--he determined to come back to England and see with his own eyes whether she was safe and well. And when he saw her"--there was a sob in her voice--"he said to himself that perhaps after all she was a hard, unfeeling creature who had forgotten him, or a wicked, treacherous woman who would betray her own father, and that he would go away back to America and never see her again, forgetting to ask whether she had not a heart and a memory too, and whether it might not be that she had loved him all her life, and whether she was not longing to fall upon his neck and kiss his dear face, and tell him that she wanted a father for many, many dreary years, and that she trusts him, believes in him, loves him with all her heart!

Oh, father, father!"--and Cynthia lay sobbing on his breast.

She had thrown herself impulsively on her knees beside him; her arms were round his neck, and he was covering her face with kisses. He did not attempt to deny that she had spoken the truth--that he was indeed her father--the man who had been condemned to death, and whom she had believed until this moment to be in America, if still indeed alive; but neither did he try to prove the fact. He sat still, with his arms round her, and--to her surprise--the tears running down his cheeks as freely as they were running down her own. She looked up at him at last and smiled rather piteously in his face.

"Dear father," she said, "and have you come all this way and run into so much danger just to see me?"

"Yes, I have, Cynthy," said the man who called himself Reuben Dare. "I said to myself, I can't get on any longer without seeing her, any way.

If that's my girl that sings--as her mother did before her--I shall know her in a trice. But, bless you, my girl, I didn't--not till you began to speak! And then t'was just like your mother."

"Am I so much altered?" said Cynthia wistfully.