Miss Dodan sat near the wide window looking toward Christ Church and the quickly descending road over which only a few days ago my father had journeyed.  I caught in her face, as I entered, an anxious and disturbed glance, and I felt almost instantly an intimation of disaster.  She turned to me as I came into the room and with a quick movement advanced.

“Mr. Dodd, your father is ill.  I hardly know what is the matter with him.  He is quite strange; does not know us when we talk to him, and wanders in a talk about ‘magnetic waves’ and ‘his wife’ and ’different code.’  Won’t you come to see him?  You may help him greatly.”

The kind, clear eyes looked up into mine and the impulse of real sympathy as she pressed my hand seemed unmistakable.  I asked a few questions and was convinced that my father was the victim of some sort of shock, perhaps precipitated by the continuous excitement caused by our unaccountable experience in the observatory.

I was but a few moments getting ready for the drive to Christ Church.  I remember the cold, crisp air, the rapid motion, and can I ever forget it—­the nearness and touch of Miss Dodan’s person, perhaps only a hurried brushing past me of her arm, the stray touch of her floating hair, or the accidental stubbing of her foot against my own.  It seemed a short, delicious drive.  I fear my heart was almost equally divided between apprehension for my father’s health and the joy of simple nearness to the woman I loved.  At last we reached Christ Church.  The Dodans lived in the suburbs in a pretty villa on a high hill, from whose top the city lay spread before them in its modest extent with its neighboring places and Port Lyttelon eight miles away.

I found my father better, but it required my own zeal and affection to thoroughly restore him, and bring him back to his characteristic interest and alertness, which made him so original and delightful a companion.  At length, by a week’s nursing, during which Miss Dodan and myself were frequently together, becoming more and more attached to each other, my father renewed his wonted studies, and strongly desired to return to the “plateau.”

I almost regretted, harsh as the thought may seem, our return.  Such incidents are now a kind of sweet sadness to recall, for as I write these words, I hear nearer and nearer the summons that must put me also in the spirit world, while she, in whose heart my own trustingly lived, has been taken away, I think wisely and prudently, to live with her father’s people in a charming, rustic village of Devonshire.  But oh! so far away! and this picture which daily I draw from beneath the pillow of my sick couch must alone serve to replace the companionship of her face and voice.

I can permit myself in this last record of an unrecoverable past to describe a treasured incident just before I left the Dodan home with my father.  I was coming out of my room when I found Miss Dodan also emerging from her own bedroom at the opposite end of an upper hall.  We met and I said:  “Miss Dodan, it is a treacherous confession, but I wish you were going back with us, or that my father would stay a little longer here.  I shall miss you.”