None of these details would interest Ruth; nor was it necessary that they should.  The bonnet, however, was another matter.  Bonnets were worn over pretty heads and framed lovely hair and faces and eyes—­one especially!  And then again any pleasantry of her father’s would tend to relieve her mind after the anxiety of the morning.  Yes, the bonnet by all means!

“Oh, I never gave you your father’s message,” he began, laying aside his cup, quite as if he had just remembered it.  “I ought to have done so before you hung up the hat you wore a while ago.”

Ruth looked up, smiling:  “Why?” There was a roguish expression about her mouth as she spoke.  She was very happy this afternoon.

“He says you won’t get a new bonnet all summer,” continued Jack, toying with the end of the ribbon that floated from her waist.

Ruth put down her cup and half rose from her chair All the color had faded from her cheeks.

“Did he tell you that?” she cried, her eyes staring into his, her voice trembling as if from some sudden fright.

Jack gazed at her in wonderment: 

“Yes—­of course he did and—­Why, Miss Ruth!—­Why, what’s the matter!  Have I said anything that—­”

“Then something serious has happened,” she interrupted in a decided tone.  “That is always his message to me when he is in trouble.  That is what he telegraphed me when he lost the coffer-dam in the Susquehanna.  Oh!—­he did not really tell you that, did he, Mr. Breen?” The old anxious note had returned—­the one he had heard at the “fill.”

“Yes—­but nothing serious has happened, Miss Ruth,” Jack persisted, his voice rising in the intensity of his conviction, his earnest, truthful eyes fixed on hers—­“nothing that will not come out all right in the end.  Please, don’t be worried, I know what I am talking about.”

“Oh, yes, it is serious,” she rejoined with equal positiveness.  “You do not know daddy.  Nothing ever discourages him, and he meets everything with a smile—­but he cannot stand any more losses.  The explosion was bad enough, but if this ‘fill’ is to be rebuilt, I don’t know what will be the end of it.  Tell me over again, please —­how did he look when he said it?—­and give me just the very words.  Oh, dear, dear daddy!  What will he do?” The anxious note had now fallen to one of the deepest suffering.

Jack repeated the message word for word, all his tenderness in his tones—­patting her shoulder in his effort to comfort her—­ending with a minute explanation of what Garry had told him:  but Ruth would not be convinced.

“But you don’t know daddy,” she kept repeating “You don’t know him.  Nobody does but me.  He would not have sent that message had he not meant it.  Listen!  There he is now!” she cried, springing to her feet.

She had her arms around her father’s neck, her head nestling on his shoulder before he had fairly entered the door.  “Daddy, dear, is it very bad?” she murmured.