Before this letter was received news came to Washington of poor Brant’s death. His boasted skill had not prevailed against his experienced adversary, and he had played the coward’s part by taking his own life. With Miss Percy Fred had felt indignant at the man who had been indirectly the cause of Brant’s death, and although he did not curse him as she had done, he never thought of him without a feeling of horror. And now it was proven that he was the father of the girl he loved more than his life, and with his recollection of Mr. Grey he knew that he was not the unprincipled man he had imagined Brant’s adversary to be. He, like Brant, was infected with a disease he had not the strength to resist, and his life had paid the penalty of his misdeeds. Louie was his daughter, and he felt all his animosity against her father slipping from him, and thought of him only as the courteous, gentlemanly man whom he had known in Merivale. “Louie,” he said, “you must not think I will give you up for anything your father did. From what Brant wrote I can understand how headstrong he was, and can see that your father tried to dissuade him from his folly. Don’t cry so, you frighten me—and don’t talk of going away. Where can you go. Your place is here with me,” and he folded her more closely in his arms until her sobbing ceased and she lay very quiet, listening to his words of love, with only an occasional long-drawn sigh and great hot tears on her cheek. She knew he meant all he said, but did not understand how he or anyone could care for her now, and it was days before Miss Percy’s unchanged kindness and Fred’s persistent love-making could win her back to anything like herself. “If anything more comes to me I shall die; and I should want to die now but for you,” she said to Fred one day; and he knew then that the state of morbid depression into which she had fallen was passing, and he watched over her with all the care of a fond mother for the child which has been hurt and is slowly recovering. For this recovery Miss Percy did much, while Mrs. Lansing treated her as if she were already her daughter. In this manner the summer was passed in Switzerland, at different points; and in September Italy was talked of as a place where to spend the winter. Fred was anxious for the marriage to take place at once, but Louie refused. “So much has happened to me and so fast,” she said, “that I feel as if I were weak in mind as well as body, and I must have time to rally and know what I am doing. “And then,” she added, with a quaver in her voice, “when I am married, if I ever am, I want to go to Merivale and see the old place once more, and the people, and father’s grave. Then I will go wherever you like, and try to forget the past, which makes me sad.”