“God of Heaven!” she said, when she had reached the street; “there should be some similarity of thought, some community of feeling between a father and his child. Do I and Jacob Gray think alike in anything? Have we one feeling in common?—No,—not one.”
As the probabilities of his not being her father crowded upon her mind, now that the intense excitement of the minute was over, Ada became more happy and composed, and she slackened her pace, seeing that she had already placed a considerable distance between herself and the house which had been to her a prison for so long a period.
“I will not, cannot believe it,” she said to herself; “that man is no father of mine. ’Twas a trick—a master-stroke in the extremity of his fortunes to bend me to his wishes, for some reasons which I know not, and cannot even hazard the wildest guess of. My father? Jacob Gray, my father? Oh, no, no, no! Rather never let me look upon a father’s face, than feel assured of such a horror as that! It cannot—cannot be. Oh, what would I not give to be assured of the lie! Had I worlds of riches in my grasp, I would unloose my hold and let them fly from me to be assured, past all doubt—past all hesitation, that Jacob Gray was to me neither father nor uncle.”
The dank fog that hung upon the Thames was now slowly clearing from before the face of heaven, and by the time Ada had reached Westminster Bridge, she could see through several breaks in the sky, glimpses of the starry host looking down upon the rapidly departing night.
The excitement the young girl had gone through had hitherto supported her against the intense coldness of the raw air, but now she trembled in every limb, and as she stood upon the silent bridge, trying to pierce with her dark, lustrous eyes, the heavy fog, and to catch a glimpse of the rushing stream below, she felt the cold to her very heart, and all the miseries of her homeless, friendless situation, rushing at once like a full tide upon her mind, she shrank into one of the little alcoves of the bridge, and sinking upon the rude wooden seat, she burst into tears, and sobbed aloud in the deep anguish of her heart.
Suddenly then she started to her feet, as she heard a heavy footstep approaching. Her first impulse was to leave her place of refuge, and walk quickly onwards, but a second thought caused her to shrink back, with the hope that the stranger would pass on, and she should escape his observation.