“Yes, you are the one I wanted to see; that is, to-day.  Later, I hope to have the privilege of a conversation with Mr. Brotherson.”

She gave him one quick look, trembling so that he offered her his arm with a fatherly air.

“I see that you understand my errand here,” he proceeded, with a grave smile, meant as she knew for her encouragement.  “I am glad, because we can go at once to the point.  Miss Scott,” he continued in a voice from which he no longer strove to keep back the evidences of deep feeling, “I have the strongest interest in your patient that one man can have in another, where there is no personal acquaintanceship.  You who have every reason to understand my reasons for this, will accept the statement, I hope, as frankly as it is made.”

She nodded.  Her eyes were full of tears, but she did not hesitate to raise them.  She had the greatest desire to see the face of the man who could speak like this to-day, and yet of whose pride and sense of superiority his daughter had stood in such awe, that she had laid a seal upon the impulses of her heart, and imposed such tasks and weary waiting upon her lover.  Doris forgot, in meeting his softened glance and tender, almost wistful, expression, the changes which can be made by a great grief, and only wondered why her sweet benefactress had not taken him into her confidence and thus, possibly, averted the doom which Doris felt had in some way grown out of this secrecy.

“Why should she have feared the disapproval of this man?” she inwardly queried, as she cast him a confiding look which pleased him greatly, as his tone now showed.

“When I lost my daughter, I lost everything,” he declared, as they walked slowly up the road.  “Nothing excites my interest, save that which once excited hers.  I am told that the deepest interest of her life lay here.  I am also told that it was an interest quite worthy of her.  I expect to find it so.  I hope with all my heart to find it so, and that is why I have come to this town and expect to linger till Mr. Brotherson has recovered sufficiently to see me.  I hope that this will be agreeable to him.  I hope that I am not presuming too much in cherishing these expectations.”

Doris turned her candid eyes upon him.

“I cannot tell; I do not know,” said she.  “Nobody knows, not even the doctor, what effect the news we so dread to give him will have upon Mr. Brotherson.  You will have to wait—­we all shall have to wait the results of that revelation.  It cannot be kept from him much longer.  When I return, I shall shrink from his first look, in the fear of seeing it betray this dreadful knowledge.  Yet I have a faithful woman there to keep every one out of his room.”

“You have had much to carry for one so young,” was Mr. Challoner’s sympathetic remark.  “You must let me help you when that awful moment comes.  I am at the hotel and shall stay there till Mr. Brotherson is pronounced quite well.  I have no other duty now in life but to sustain him through his trouble and then, with what aid he can give, search out and find the cause of my daughter’s death which I will never admit without the fullest proof, to have been one of suicide.”