My Pretty Maid; or, Liane Lester

"I was so sure of her identity that her anger was quite embarrassing," she said.

Roma's thoughts returned to granny's affection for herself, and she felt sure the old woman had lied to her mother, though from what object she could not conceive. Her abject affection for herself seemed fully explained by the fact of her having been her nurse child.

But she was, somehow, ill at ease after hearing her mother's story, and longed eagerly to know more than she had already heard.

"I wonder if I dare question papa or the old doctor?" she thought when her mother had left her alone, resting easily in her furred dressing gown and slippers before a bright coal fire, while in the room beyond Dolly Dorr was getting her bath ready.

Roma was devoured by curiosity. She sat racking her brain for a pretext to intrude on her father and the old doctor, who were still in the library together, chatting over old times when the Clarkes had lived in Brookline.

A lucky thought came to her, and she murmured:

"I will pretend to have a headache, and ask Doctor Jay for something to ease it. Then I will stay a while chatting with them and making myself very agreeable until I can bring the subject around, and get the interesting fact of my abduction out of them."

Stealing noiselessly from the room, she glided downstairs like a shadow, pausing abruptly at the hall table, for there lay the evening's mail, just brought in by a servant from the village post office.

Roma turned over the letters and papers, finding none for any one but her father, but the superscription on one made her start with a stifled cry.

She recognized the elegant chirography of Jesse Devereaux on the back of one letter.

"Now, why is he writing to papa?" she wondered, eagerly turning the letter over and over in her burning hand, wild with curiosity that tempted her at last to slip the letter into her bosom.

Then, taking the rest of the mail in her hand, Roma went to the library, thinking that the delivery of the mail would furnish another plausible pretext for her intrusion.

There was a little anteroom just adjoining the library, and this she entered first to wait a moment till the fierce beating of her heart over Devereaux's letter should quiet down.

Her slippered feet made no sound on the thick velvet carpet, and, as she rested for a moment in a large armchair, she could hear the murmur of animated voices through the heavy portières that hung between her and the library.

Believing that the whole family had retired, and that they were safe from interruption, Doctor Jay and his host had returned to the tragedy of eighteen years before—the loss of the infant that had nearly cost the mother's life.

Roma caught her breath with a stifled gasp of self-congratulation, hoping now to hear the whole interesting story without moving from her chair.

In her hope she was not disappointed.

"I have never ceased to regret the substitution of that spurious infant in place of my own lovely child," sighed Mr. Clarke.

Roma gave a start of consternation, and almost betrayed herself by screaming out aloud, but she bit her lips in time, while her wildly throbbing heart seemed to sink like a stone in her breast.

Doctor Jay said questioningly:

"You have never been able to love your adopted daughter as your own?"

"Never, never!" groaned Edmund Clarke despairingly.

"And her mother?"

"She knows nothing, suspects nothing; for the one object of my life has been to keep her in ignorance of the truth that Roma is not her own child. She has an almost slavish devotion to the girl, but I think in her inmost heart she realizes Roma's lack of lovable qualities, though she is too loyal to her child to admit the truth even to me."

"It is strange, most strange, that no clue has ever been found that would lead to the discovery of your lost little one," mused the old doctor, and after a moment's silence the other answered:

"One thing I would like to know, and that is the family from which Roma sprang. It must have been low, judging frankly from the girl herself."

The listener clinched her hands till the blood oozed from the tender palms on hearing these words, and she would have liked to clutch the speaker's throat instead.

But she sat still, like one paralyzed, a deadly hatred tugging at her heartstrings, listening as one listens to the sentence of death, while Doctor Jay cleared his throat, and answered:

"I am sorry, most sorry, that your surmises are correct, but naturally one would not expect to find good blood in a foundling asylum, though when I sent Nurse Jenks for the child, I told her to get an infant of honest parentage, if she could."

"Then you know Roma's antecedents?" Mr. Clarke questioned anxiously.

"My dear friend, I wish that you would not press the subject."

"Answer me; I must know! The bitterest truth could not exceed my suspicions!" almost raved Mr. Clarke in his eagerness, and again the clinched hands of the listener tightened as if they were about his throat.

Hate, swift, terrible, murderous, had sprung to life, full grown in the angry girl's heart.

She heard the old doctor cough and sigh again, and a futile wish rose in her that he had dropped down dead before he ever came to Cliffdene.

Doctor Jay, all unconscious of her proximity and her charitable wishes, proceeded hesitatingly:

"Since you insist, I must own the truth. Nurse Jenks deceived me."

"How?" hoarsely.

"She never went near the foundling asylum. She had at her own home an infant, the child of a worthless daughter, who had run away previously to go on the stage. Leaving this child on her mother's hands, the actress again ran away, and the old grandmother palmed it off on you as a foundling."

"My God! I see it all," groaned Edmund Clarke. "The old fiend exchanged infants, putting her grandchild in the place of my daughter, and raising her in poverty and wretchedness. I have seen my child with her, my beautiful daughter. Listen to my story," he cried, pouring out to the astonished old physician the whole moving story of Liane Lester.

CHAPTER XXII.

AT A FIEND'S MERCY

Doctor Jay listened with breathless attention, and so did Roma.

Pale as a breathing statue, her great eyes dilated with dismay and horror, her heart beating heavily and slow, Roma crouched in her chair and listened to the awful words that told her who and what she was, the base-born child of Cora Jenks, and granddaughter of old granny, whose very name was a synonym for contempt in Stonecliff.

She, Roma, who despised poor people, who treated them no better than the dust beneath her well-shod feet, belonged to the common herd, and was usurping the place of beautiful Liane, whom she had despised for her lowly estate and hated for her beauty, but who had become first her rival in love and now in fortune.

To the day of her death beautiful, wicked Roma never forgot that bleak November night, that blasted all her pride and flung her down into the dust of humiliation and despair, her towering pride crushed, all the worst passions of her evil nature aroused into pernicious activity.

Stiller than chiseled marble, the stricken girl crouched there, listening, fearing to lose even a single word, though each one quivered like a dagger in her heart.

Her greatest enemy could not have wished her a keener punishment than this knowledge of her position in the Clarke household—an adopted daughter, secretly despised and only tolerated for the mother's sake, holding her place only until the real heiress should be discovered.

No words could paint her rage, her humiliation, her terrors of the future, that held a sword that might at any moment fall.

Oh, how she hated the world, and every one in it, and most of all Liane Lester, her guiltless rival.

While she listened, she wished the girl dead a hundred times, and all at once a throbbing memory came to her of the fierce words Granny Jenks had spoken in her rage against Liane.