"My father!" Sofia repeated in a gasp of disdain--"_you!_"
He gave a slight shrug.
"Such, it appears, is your sad fortune."
"A servant!"
"And not the proud prince you were promised? Rather a come down, one must
admit." Lanyard laughed low, and moved nearer. "I'm sorry, I mean I might
be (for myself, too) if Nogam were less a fraud than that pretentious
mountebank, Prince Victor--or for the matter of that, if you were as poor
of spirit as you would seem on your own valuation, if you were not at heart
your mother's daughter, and mine, my child by a woman whom I loved well,
and who long ago loved me!"
He paused deliberately to let her grasp the full sense of his words, then
pursued:
"It may help you get your bearings to know that I am truly the Michael
Lanyard to whom Messieurs Secretan & Sypher addressed their
advertisement--you remember--as this should prove."
He offered a slip of paper, and after another moment of dumb staring, the
girl took it and read aloud the message which Victor had dictated following
Sofia's flight to him from the Cafe des Exiles.
_"'To Michael Lanyard, Intelligence Division, the War Office,
Whitehall--'"_
"That is to say," Lanyard interpreted, "of the British Secret Service."
"You!"
He bowed in light irony. "One regrets one is at present unable to offer
better social standing. To-morrow, it may be ... But who knows?"
Sofia shook her head impatiently, and in a murmur of deepening amazement
resumed her reading of the note:
_"'Your daughter Sofia is now with me.
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