"Her father!" he repeated hurriedly.

"Jose Arguello! Great God!--are you sure ?" Quietly and yet mechanically gathering the scattered tracts from the coverlet, and putting them back, one by one in her reticule, she closed it and her lips with a snap as she uttered--"Yes." Pendleton remained staring at her silently, "Yes," he muttered, "it may have been some instinct of the child's, or some diabolical fancy of Briones'.

But," he said bitterly, "true or not, she has no right to his name." "And I say she HAS." She had risen to her feet, with her arms folded across her breast, in an attitude of such Puritan composure that the distant spectators might have thought she was delivering an exordium to the prostrate man.
"I met Jose Arguello, for the second time, in New Orleans," she said slowly, "eight years ago.

He was still rich, but ruined in health by dissipation.

I was tired of my way of life.