Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/215

 Still again the sound of Morello's heavy laughter filled the outer room.

"So he's your father," he scoffed. "Then I call him a fine kind of a father! Ha, a fine father, wasn't he, to take all those years to train you as a forger! A fine father to take a young girl and show her the secrets of counterfeiting, and keep her at it, until she was the best steel-engraver in the business! He was a kind man, was he not, to take you out of a convent, when he found you were clever with a pen and brush, and put you to copying postage-stamps and Austrian bank-notes and let you think it was for museum exhibitions! That was a fine trick, was it not? Ha, and he was a fine father when he tried to match you off with that check-forger named Carlesi, that smooth-tongued cut-throat who had swindled his way from Messina to Berlin and back before you had stopped playing with your dolls! Ah, I see you remember Carlesi!"

"I don't want to hear any more of this!" cried the girl. "I can't listen to—" "But you must hear more of this," contended the other, losing himself more and more in that fiery torrent of words as he went on. "And you are going to hear it now. I, myself, Antonio Morello, have something to say about that. Carlesi you remember, yes, and you will never forget him. This man you call your father said you should marry him—you, a girl of eighteen and Carlesi already hunted out of Berne and Vienna and Budapest by the police! Do you know why he planned that marriage? I will tell you why. He saw he was losing his hold over you,