"It's surely better for me," he answered, "to hear the miserable
news from you than from a servant."

"What miserable news?" she asked, still as perplexed as ever.

He could preserve his self-control no longer; the misery in him
forced its way outward at last. The convulsive struggles for
breath which burst from a man in tears shook him from head to
foot.

"My poor little darling!" he gasped. "My only child!"

All that was embarrassing in her position passed from Sydney's
mind in an instant. She stepped close up to him; she laid her
hand gently and fearlessly on his arm. "Oh, Mr. Linley, what
dreadful mistake is this?"

His dim eyes rested on her with a piteous expression of doubt. He
heard her--and he was afraid to believe her. She was too deeply
distressed, too full of the truest pity for him, to wait and
think before she spoke. "Yes! yes!" she cried, under the impulse
of the moment. "The dear child knew me again, the moment I spoke
to her. Kitty's recovery is only a matter of time."

He staggered back--with a livid change in his face startling to
see. The mischief done by Mrs. Presty's sense of injury had led
already to serious results. If the thought in Linley, at that
moment, had shaped itself into words, he would have said, "And
Catherine never told me of it!" How bitterly he thought of the