“My dear fellow,” he said, “I haven’t the least idea why I came to see you this evening.”

Brooks felt that he had a right to be puzzled, and he looked it.  But his visitor was so evidently a gentleman and a person of account, that the obvious rejoinder did not occur to him.  He merely waited with uplifted eyebrows.

“Not the least idea,” his visitor repeated, still smiling.  “But at the same time I fancy that before I leave you I shall find myself explaining, or endeavouring to explain, not why I am here, but why I have not visited you before.  What do you think of that?”

“I find it,” Brooks answered, “enigmatic but interesting.”

“Exactly.  Well, I hate talking, so my explanation will not be a tedious one.  Your name is Kingston Brooks.”

“Yes.”

“Your mother’s name was Dorothy Kenneir.  She was, before her marriage, the matron of a home in the East End of London, and a lady devoted to philanthropic work.  Your father was a police-court missionary.”

Brooks was leaning a little forward in his chair.  These things were true enough.  Who was his visitor?

“Your father, through over-devotion to the philanthropic works in which he was engaged, lost his reason temporarily, and on his partial recovery I understand that the doctors considered him still to be mentally in a very weak state.  They ordered him a sea voyage.  He left England on the Corinthia fifteen years ago, and I believe that you heard nothing more of him until you received the news of his death—­probably ten years back.”

“Yes!  Ten years ago.

“Your mother, I think, lived for only a few months after your father left England.  You found a guardian in Mr. Ascough of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  There my knowledge of your history ceases.

“How do you know these things?” Brooks asked.

“I was with your father when he died.  It was I who wrote to you and sent his effects to England.”

“You were there—­in Canada?”

“Yes.  I had a dwelling within a dozen miles of where your father had built his hut by the side of the great lake.  He was the only other Englishman within a hundred miles.  So I was with him often.”

“It is wonderful—­after all these years,” Brooks exclaimed.  “You were there for sport, of course?”

“For sport!” his visitor repeated in a colourless tone.

“But my father—­what led him there?  Why did he cut himself off from every one, send no word home, creep away into that lone country to die by himself?  It is horrible to think of.”

“Your father was not a communicative man.  He spoke of his illness.  I always considered him as a person mentally shattered.  He spent his days alone, looking out across the lake or wandering in the woods.  He had no companions, of course, but there were always animals around him.  He had the look of a man who had suffered.”

“He was to have gone to Australia,” Brooks said.  “It was from there that we expected news from him.  I cannot see what possible reason he had for changing his plans.  There was no mystery about his life in London.  It was one splendid record of self-denial and devotion to what he thought his duty.”