“It is incredible.  Why should she do such a thing?  She has always been a perfect nurse—­a perfect nurse, Drake.”  He rose and walked the floor.  “But deliberately to disobey my orders—­what could have been her object?”

Derry hesitated.

“I haven’t told you the worst.”

Doctor McKenzie stopped in front of him.  “The worst?”

“Dad is going to marry her.”

“What?”

Derry repeated what he had said.

The Doctor dropped into a chair.  “Who told you?”

“Dad.”

“And she admitted that it was—­true?”

“Yes.”

Derry gave the facts.  “He wasn’t himself, of course, but that doesn’t change things for me.”

The Doctor in the practice of his profession had learned to conceal his emotions.  He concealed now what he was feeling, but a close observer might have seen in the fading of the color in his cheeks, the beating of his clenched fist on the arm of his chair, something of that which was stirring within him.

“And this has been going on ever since she went there.  She has had it in mind to wear your mother’s jewels—­” Derry had graphically described Bronson’s watch on the stairs—­“to get your father’s money.  I knew she was cold-blooded, but I had always thought it a rather admirable quality in a woman of her attractive type.”

Before his eye came the vision of Hilda’s attractiveness by his fireside, at his table.  And now she would sit by the General’s fire, at his table.

“She didn’t say a word,” Derry’s young voice went on, “when he told me that I was no longer—­his son.  I can’t tell you how I felt about her.  I’ve never felt that way about anyone before.  I’ve always liked people—­but it was as if some evil thing had swooped down on the old house.”

The lad saw straight!  That was the thought which suddenly illumined Dr. McKenzie’s troubled mind.  Hilda was not beautiful.  So beauty of body could offset the ugliness of her distorted soul.

“And so I am poor,” Derry was saying, heavily, “and I must wait to marry Jean.”

The red surged up in the Doctor’s face.  He jerked himself forward in his chair.  “You shall not wait.  After this you are my son, if you are not your father’s.”

He laid his hand on Derry’s shoulder.  “I’ve money enough, God knows.  And I shan’t need it.  It isn’t a fortune, but it is enough to make all of us comfortable for the rest of our days—­and I want Jean to be happy.  Do you think I am going to let Hilda Merritt stand between my child and happiness?”

“It’s awfully good of you, sir,” Derry’s voice was husky with feeling, “but—­”

“There are no ‘buts.’  You must let me have my own way; I shall consider it a patriotic privilege to support one soldier and his little wife.”

He was riding above the situation splendidly.  He even had visions of straightening things out.  “When I go back I shall tell Hilda what I think of her, I shall tell her that it is preposterous—­that her professional reputation is at stake.”