“I am afraid I don’t know you,” he answered.  “I feel that I know nobody now, not even my son.”

He had hoped she would look up at this, but she did not.

“Will my little girl think me very curious and very impertinent if I ask her what my son Frederick was saying when I came into the room?”

She looked up now, and with visible candour answered him immediately and to the point: 

“Frederick is in trouble, Mr. Sutherland.  He has felt the need of a friend who could appreciate this, and he has asked me to be that friend.  Besides, he brought me a packet of letters which he entreated me to keep for him.  I took them, Mr. Sutherland, and I will keep them as he asked me to do, safe from everybody’s inspection, even my own.”

Oh! why had he questioned her?  He did not want to know of these letters; he did not want to know that Frederick possessed anything which he was afraid to retain in his own possession.

“My son did wrong,” said he, “to confide anything to your care which he did not desire to retain in his own home.  I feel that I ought to see these letters, for if my son is in trouble, as you say, I, his father, ought to know it.”

“I am not sure about that,” she smiled.  “His trouble may be of a different nature than you imagine.  Frederick has led a life that he regrets.  I think his chief source of suffering lies in the fact that it is so hard for him to make others believe that he means to do differently in the future.”

“Does he mean to do differently?”

She flushed.  “He says so, Mr. Sutherland.  And I, for one, cannot help believing him.  Don’t you see that he begins to look like another man?”

Mr. Sutherland was taken aback.  He had noticed this fact, and had found it a hard one to understand.  To ascertain what her explanation of it might be, he replied at once: 

“There is a change in him—­a very evident change.  What is the occasion of it?  To what do you ascribe it, Agnes?”

How breathlessly he waited for her answer!  Had she any suspicion of the awful doubts which were so deeply agitating himself that night?  She did not appear to have.

“I hesitate,” she faltered, “but not from any doubt of Frederick, to tell you just what I think lies at the bottom of the sudden change observable in him.  Miss Page (you see, I can name her, if you cannot) has proved herself so unworthy of his regard that the shock he has received has opened his eyes to certain failings of his own which made his weakness in her regard possible.  I do not know of any other explanation.  Do you?”

At this direct question, breathed though it was by tender lips, and launched in ignorance of the barb which carried it to his heart, Mr. Sutherland recoiled and cast an anxious look upon the door.  Then with forced composure he quietly said:  “If you who are so much nearer his age, and, let me hope, his sympathy, do not feel sure of his real feelings, how should I, who am his father, but have never been his confidant?”