“Perhaps—­You do not quite understand my position here?  Mr. Guinness is not my own father.”

“No, I knew that.”

“But you cannot know what he has been to me:  I never knew until the last few days.”

“Why within these few days, Miss Vogdes?”

“Because I saw you and Maria:  I saw what love was.  I began to think about it.  I never have loved anybody but him,” she went on headlong, utterly blind to all inferences.  “There’s a thing I can do for him, Doctor McCall, before I marry Mr. Muller, and I must do it.  It will make his old age happier than any other part of his life has been.”

McCall nodded, leaning forward.  It was nothing but an imprudent girl dragging out her secrets before a stranger; nothing but a heated face, wet eyes, a sweet milky breath; but no tragedy he had ever seen on the stage had moved him so uncontrollably—­no, not any crisis in his own life—­with such delicious, inexplicable emotion.

“Well, what is it you can do?” after waiting for her to go on.

There was a moment’s silence.

“My father,” said Kitty, “had once a great trouble.  It has made an old man of him before his time.  I find that I can take it from him.”  She looked up at him with this.  Now, there was a certain shrewd penetration under the softness of Kitty’s eyes.  Noting it, McCall instantly lost sight of her beauty and tears.  He returned her look coolly.

“What was his trouble?”

“Mr. Guinness had a son.  He has believed him to be dead for years:  I know that he is not dead.”

Doctor McCall waited, with her eyes still upon him.  “Well?” he said, attentive.

“And then,” pushing back the table and rising, “when I heard that, I meant to go and find Hugh Guinness, and bring him back to his father.”

Whatever this matter might be to her hearer, it was the most real thing in life to Catharine, and putting it into words gave it a sudden new force.  She felt that she ought to hold her tongue, but she could not.  She only knew that the lighted room, the beating of the rain without, the watchful guarded face on the other side of the table, shook and frightened and angered her unaccountably.

“You should not laugh at me,” she said.  “This is the first work I ever set myself to do.  It is better than nursing three hundred children.”

“I am not laughing at you, God knows!  But this Guinness, if he be alive, remains away voluntarily.  There must be a reason for that.  You do not consider.”

“I do not care to consider.  Is the man a log or a stone?  If I found him,” crossing the room in her heat until she stood beside him—­“if I brought him to the old house and to his father?  Why, look at this!” dragging open the drawer and taking out the broken gun and rod.  “See what he has kept for years—­all that was left him of his boy!  Look, at that single hair!  If Hugh Guinness stood where you do, and touched these things as you are touching them, could he turn his back on the old man?”