"Never mind, my pet. There, you have cried enough. Tell your own dear Clara who has dared to vex you."
To see that sweet child's misery, I felt in such a rage, I could have boxed her enemy's ears. But I never thought that it was more than a child's vexation. At last, after drinking a tumblerful of water, and giving room to her palpitating heart, she contrived to tell me her trouble.
"Why, dear, you know my pappy--pappy I used to call him--he is not my papa at all, he says himself he is not; and that is not the worst of it, for I could do well enough without him, he is always so dreadfully cross, and doesn't care for me one bit. I could do without him very well, if I had a proper papa, or if my father was dead and had loved me before he died; but now I have no father at all, and never had any in the world; I am only an outcast, an abandoned-- Oh, Clara, will you promise to forgive me, and love me all the same?"
"To be sure I will, my dearest. I am sure, you have done no harm. And even if you have been led astray--"
She looked at me with quick pride flashing through her abasement, and she took her arm off my shoulder.
"No, you have quite mistaken me. Do you think I would sit here and kiss you, if I were a wicked girl? But who am I to be indignant at anything now? He told me--are you sure the door is shut?--he told me, with a sneer, that I was a base-born child, and he used a worse word than that."
She fell away from me, her cheeks all crimson with shame, and her long eyelashes drooping heavily on them. I caught her to my heart: poor wronged one, was she a whit less pure? I seemed to love her the better, for her great misfortune. Of course, I had guessed it long ago, from what her brother told me.
"And who is your father, my pretty? Any father must be a fool who would not be proud of you."
"Oh, Clara, the worst of it is that I have not the least idea. But from something that hard man said, I believe he was an Englishman. I think I could have got everything from him, he was so beside himself; but when he told me that dreadful thing, and said that my father had lied to my mother and ruined her, I felt so sick that I could not speak, till he turned me out of the house, and struck me as I went."