“Really, father, I beg you not to—­”

“Why not, pray?” requested Flint, gazing at her through his pince-nez.  “My intentions, I assure you, were most honest and philanthropic.  If I had found him—­then—­I’d have given him—­”

“Oh, but he wouldn’t have taken anything, you see!” the girl interrupted, with some spirit.  “I told you that, at the time.  It’s just as true, now.  So please, father, let’s drop the question altogether.”

“I’m sorry not to be able to grant your request, my dear,” said the old man, with hidden malice.  “But really, this time, you must hear me.  My disappointment arises from the fact that I’ve just discovered the young man’s identity, and—­”

“You—­you have?” Kate exclaimed, grasping the edge of the table with a nervous hand.  Her father smiled again, bitterly.

“Yes, I have,” said he, with slow emphasis, “and I regret to say, my dear child, that my diagnosis of his character is precisely what I first thought.  Any interest you may feel in that quarter is being applied to a very unworthy object.  The man is one of my discharged employees, a thorough rascal and hard ticket in every way—­one of the lowest-bred and most villainous persons yet unhung, I grieve to state.  The fact that he carried you in his arms, and that I owe your preservation to him, is one of the bitterest facts in my life.  Had it been any other man, no matter of what humble birth—­”

“Father!” she cried, bending forward and gazing at him with strange eyes.  “Father!  By what right and on what authority do you make these accusations?  That man, I know, was all that innate gentleness and upright manhood could make any man.  His nobility was not of wealth or title, but of—­”

“Nonsense!” Flint interrupted.  “Nobility, eh?  Read that, will you?”

Leering, despite himself, he handed the paper across the table to his daughter.

“Those marked passages,” said he.  “And remember, this is only the beginning.  Wait till all the facts are known, the whole conspiracy laid bare and everything exposed to public view! Then tell me, if you can, that he is poor but noble!  Bah!  Sunday-school dope, that!  Noble, yes!”

Catherine sat there staring at the paper, a minute, as though quite unable to decipher a word.  Through a kind of wavering mist that seemed to swim before her eyes, she vaguely saw the words:  “Socialist White Slaver!” but that these bore any relation to the man she remembered, back there at the sugar-house, had not yet occurred to her mind.  She simply could not grasp the significance of the glaring headlines.  And, turning a blank gaze on her father’s face, she stammered: 

“Why—­why do you give me this?  What has this got to do with—­me?  With him?”

“Everything!” snarled the Billionaire, violently irritated by his daughter’s seeming obtuseness.  “Everything, I tell you!  That man, that strong and noble hero of yours, is this man!  This white slaver!  This wild beast—­this Socialist—­this Anarchist!  Do you understand now, or don’t you?  Do you grasp the truth at last, or is your mind incapable of apprehending it?”