Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/220

 he did not lament the discovery. It left him with something to live for, something to work for.

But Kestner could give no further thought to the matter, for the girl on the other side of the door was already speaking again. The timbre of her voice had altered. It seemed touched with fear, and at the same time with exaltation. It carried, even above the trivial noises of that sordid rookery of sordid lives, the note of a soul which found itself confronted by issues wider than it could understand.

"That can't be true!" she half-sobbed. "It can't!"

"You do not believe? No! That is natural," Morello cried back at her. "They have made all your life a lie. But when I show you Carlesi, face to face, will you believe?"

"I can't believe it!" Yet for all that protest her voice carried a note of tremulous rhapsody which even Kestner could detect. And Morello, glorying in the discovery that he was upsetting her world about her, that he was leaving her nothing stable, nothing on which to rely, let the tide of his grim purpose carry him along.

"You will come with me, and then you will know. I do not ask you to believe. You will see, with your own eyes. And then you will know. You will know what I know, that Paul Lambert is not your father, that he robbed your father in Civitavecchia when he went there dying of Roman fever. Lambert had been sent there from Paris, to steal maps of the fort. But instead of stealing the maps, he stole you. He saw you were a clever child and that he could make use of