“Of course you will stay with me, Lillian, while he is here,” I said.

She smiled enigmatically.  “Part of the time,” she said.

But when Mr. Gordon came, bringing with him an immense sheaf of roses, she left the room almost at once, giving as an excuse her wish to arrange the flowers.

My visitor’s eyes were burning with a light that almost frightened me as he sat down by my bedside and took my hand in his.

“My dear child,” he said, and though the words were such as any elderly man might address to a young woman, yet there was an intensity in them that made me uncomfortable.  “Are you sure everything is all right with you?”

“Very sure,” I replied, smiling.  “If Mrs. Underwood would permit me to do so, I am certain I could get up now.”

“You must not think of trying it,” he returned sharply, and with a note in his voice, almost like authority, which puzzled me.

“Thank God for Mrs. Underwood!” he went on.  “She is a woman in a thousand.  I am indebted to her for life.”

I shrank back among my pillows, and wished that Lillian would return to the room.  I began to wonder if Mr. Gordon’s brain was not slightly turned.  Surely, the fact that he had once known and loved my mother was no excuse for the extravagant attitude he was taking.

He saw the movement, and into his eyes flashed a look so mournful, so filled with longing that I was thrilled to the heart.  The next moment he threw himself upon his knees by the side of my bed, and cried out tensely: 

“Oh, my darling child, don’t shrink from me.  You will kill me.  Don’t you see?  Can’t you guess?  I am your father!”

My father!  Robert Gordon my father!

I looked at the elderly man kneeling beside my bed, and my brain whirled with the unreality of it all.  The “man of mystery,” the “Quester” of Broadway, the elderly soldier of fortune, about whose reputed wealth and constant searching of faces wherever he was the idle gossip of the city’s Bohemia had whirled—­to think that this man was the father I had never known, the father, alas! whom I had hoped never to know.

Everything was clear to me now—­the reason for his staring at me when he first caught sight of me in the Sydenham Hotel, his trailing of my movements until he had found out my name and home, the introduction he obtained to Dicky, and through him to me, his emotion at hearing my mother’s name, his embarrassing attentions to me ever since—­the explanation for all of which had puzzled me had come in the choking words of the man whose head was bowed against my bed, and whose whole frame was shaking with suppressed sobs.

I felt myself trembling in the grip of a mighty surge of longing to gather that bowed gray head into my arms and lavish the love he longed for upon my father.  My heart sang a little hymn of joy.  I, who had been kinless, with no one of my own blood, had found a father!