The silence which ensued was awkward, but it was better than anything I could think of to say, and Tedham himself seemed to feel it so. He said, presently, "Thank you. I was sure you would not take my coming to you the wrong way. In fact I had no one else to come to--after I----" Tedham stopped, and then, "I don't know," he went on, "whether you've kept run of me; I don't suppose you have; I got out to-day at noon." I could not say anything to that, either; there were very few openings for me, it appeared, in the conversation, which remained one-sided as before. "I went to the cemetery," he continued. "I wanted to realize that those who had died were dead, it was all one thing as long as I was in there; everybody was dead; and then I came on to your house." The house he meant was a place I had taken for the summer a little out of town, so that I could run in to business every day, and yet have my mornings and evenings in the country; the fall had been so mild that we were still eking out the summer there. "How did you know where I was staying?" I asked, with a willingness to make any occasion serve for saying something. Tedham hesitated. "Well, I stopped at the office in Boston on my way out, and inquired. I was sure nobody would know me there." He said this apologetically, as if he had been taking a liberty, and explained: "I wanted to see you very much, and I was afraid that if I let the day go by I should miss you somehow." "Oh, all right," I said. We had remained standing at the point where I had gone round to meet him, and it seemed, in the awkward silence that now followed, as if I were rooted there. I would very willingly have said something leading, for my own sake, if not for his, but I had nothing in mind but that I had better keep there, and so I waited for him to speak. I believed he was beating about the bush in his own thoughts, to find some indirect or sinuous way of getting at what he wanted to know, and that it was only because he failed that he asked bluntly, "March, do you know where my daughter is?" "No, Tedham, I don't," I said, and I was glad that I could say it both with honesty and with compassion. I was truly sorry for the man; in a way, I did pity him; at the same time I did not wish to be mixed up in his affairs; in washing my hands of them, I preferred that there should be no stain of falsehood left on them. "Where is my sister-in-law?" he asked next, and now at least I could not censure him for indirection. "I haven't met her for several years," I answered. "I couldn't say from my own knowledge where she was." "But you haven't heard of her leaving Somerville?" "No, I haven't." "Do you ever meet her husband?" "Yes, sometimes, on the street; but I think not lately; we don't often meet." "The last time you saw _her_, did she speak of me?" "I don't know--I believe--yes. It was a good many years ago." "Was she changed toward me at all?"