His tone was full of thankfulness, and all my pettiness vanished at the sudden, swift vision of what he must have endured.  The next moment he had turned my thoughts into a new channel.

“Margaret,” he said gravely, “I am terribly distressed to hear from Katherine that your husband has gone away in such a strange manner.”

So she had already told him!  The little pang of unworthy jealousy came back, but I banished it.

“Now, there must be no more time lost,” he went on.  “You have had no man to look after things for you, but remember now, your old brother, Jack, is on the job.  First, I must know everything that occurred on that last day.  Did you notice anything extraordinary in his demeanor on that last morning you saw him?”

This was the old Jack, going directly to the root of the matter, wasting no time on his own affairs or feelings, when he saw a duty before him.  I felt the old sway of his personality upon me, and answered his questions as meekly as a child might have done.

“He was just the same as he had been every morning since my accident,” I returned.

“H-m.”  Jack thought a long minute, then began again.

“Tell me everything that happened that day, every visitor you had; don’t omit the most trifling thing,” he commanded.

He listened attentively as I recalled Harry Underwood’s visit, and Robert Gordon’s.  At my revelation that Robert Gordon had said he was my father, his calm, judicial manner broke into excitement.

“Your father!” he exclaimed, and then, after a pause; “I always knew he would come back some day.  But go on.  What happened when he told you he was your father?”

I went on with the story of my struggle with my own rancor against my father, of my conviction that I had heard my mother’s voice urging my reconciliation with him, of my father’s first embrace and kisses, even of the queer smothered sound like a groan and the slamming of a door which I had heard.  Then I told him of my father’s gift of money to me, which I had not yet touched, but I noticed that toward the last of my narrative Jack seemed preoccupied.

“Did your husband come home to Marvin at all that day?” he asked.

“No, he never came back from the city after he had once gone in, until evening.”

“But are you sure that this day he did not return to Marvin?” he persisted.  “How do you know?”

“Because no one saw him,” I returned, “and he could hardly have come back without someone in the house seeing him.”

He said no more, as Lillian and Katherine came up just then, and the conversation became general.

To my great surprise, I did not see him again after that first visit.  Katherine explained to me that he had been called out of town on urgent business, but the explanation seemed to me to savor of the mysterious excitement that seemed to possess everybody around me.

Finally one morning, Lillian came to me, her face shining.