What had they done?  Dermott’s question came back to him again and again, and through the depression into which this thinking was leading him he heard Katrine singing softly on the piazza underneath his window.

Like a child he rose and went to her.  She was standing by one of the great white columns looking into the shadowy pine-trees as he came.  He did not touch her.  He had such fear of breaking utterly before her that he said, with forced quietude of voice: 

“I’ve changed my mind about marrying you, Katrine.”  In spite of his effort to be calm, his voice broke into something like a sob as he spoke her name.

“Yes,” she said, realizing what the import of the papers must have been.

After he had told Katrine the important fact in his father’s statement, there came to him with a sudden suspicion of the truth the remembrance of Dermott’s letter, in which the Irishman had stated that whatever documents he had held concerning the early marriage of the elder Ravenel had been burned.

Taking the letter from his pocket, he gave it to Katrine, who read it in the fading light and returned it wordlessly.  She had turned her face away that Frank might not see the glow of admiration she felt for that Irish Dermott whom Frank could never understand.

“What do you think of the letter, Katrine?” Frank asked.  “I fail utterly to understand it.  Dermott knew, when he wrote it, that my father had made that early marriage.  It had been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt even to me.  I feel sure that he knew nothing of a divorce or he would have mentioned it.”

“I think,” Katrine said, softly, “that Dermott told a story.  You remember”—­her voice broke a little—­“you discovered long ago he didn’t always tell the truth.”

“And you think, then,” Frank insisted, “that when McDermott wrote this letter,” he made a motion with it as he spoke, “he still believed that my father and mother were never legally married?”

“He believed just that,” Katrine answered.  “He told me so the day he wrote the letter.”

“But why did he write me what he believed to be an untruth?  Why did he burn papers which he must have believed to be valuable evidence?”

“It’s a way of his,” Katrine answered, vaguely.

“Katrine,” Frank cried, “there is more to this!  Why did McDermott do this thing for me?”

“He told me he would help you.”

“When?”

“The day I went down to Wall Street to ask him to stop the attack on your firm, when you were so ill.  It was the day I told him that I loved you.”

“And loving you himself, as he has always done, he did this for me?”

She made a sign of acquiescence.

“Ah!” he cried, the glow of enthusiasm in his eyes.  “I have never understood the man, but, before God, I honor and reverence him for what he did.  There is much of the hero in this strange Dermott McDermott.”