"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.

"But--I thought her child was a boy?"

"I am the youngest of two children."

"It is impossible that you are the daughter of that infernal, low-