To describe the exquisite intonation of voice with which these words were uttered would be impossible. The gushing tenderness, the deep pathos, the glowing tones! Oh, what must be the construction of that heart that could listen unmoved to such an appeal? Gray trembled like an aspen leaf, his eyes glared from their sockets, and he stretched out his hands before him as he would keep off some spectre that blasted his sight, and seared his very brain.
“Peace! Peace!” he shrieked; “peace! You want to—kill me, to drive me mad; but that voice—that manner—those speaking eyes!—Peace, Ada; peace, I say!”
“Ada!” cried the girl; “that, then, is my name?”
“No, no, no, no!” cried Gray. “God of Heaven!—no, no, no, no!—I—did not say Ada?”
“You did, and something tells me that it is my name—the name you have concealed from me so long. I am Ada. Uncle, some strong passion, some awful fear at your heart overcame your caution. I am Ada; but Ada what? Tell me, for the love of Heaven, all, and if you have done me wrong, Uncle, I will, forgive you, as I live!”
Jacob Gray’s voice trembled and the perspiration stood in cold drops upon his brow, as he said, faintly,—
Ada, for henceforward we will call her by that name, filled a glass with sparkling cold water, and handed it in silence to the trembling man. With a shaking hand he raised it to his lips, and drank deeply of it; the glass dropped from his nervous grasp, and lay in fragments on the floor.
Ada stood before him—her dark eyes bent on his with a scrutinising glance, beneath which he shrunk abashed.
“Now then, Uncle Gray,” she said, “now that you are better, will you answer me?”
Gray looked at her for a moment or two in silence before he replied; then he said slowly,—
“What if I refuse to answer the question you ask?”
“And—and—what will you do? What, can you do?”
“What can I do? I can toil, work, attend upon those who may perchance repay my service with a smile, ample and dear wages to the poor, desolate child of harshness and misfortune. I will leave you and this gloomy abode for ever, and trust to the mercy of that Providence that finds food for the merest insect that buzzes in the evening time!”
“Humph!” muttered Gray. “I never knew Providence to feed anything yet. Providence will let you die on a door-step, and rot in a kennel!”