"I've had another shock this evening, too," she said, speaking this time in low tones and with eyes downcast. "This Mr. Griswold: tell me all you know about him, father." "I don't know much of anything more than--thanks to Miss Grierson--all the town knows. They brought him here sick--she and her father--as I told you. That was some little time before you came home; perhaps while you were still on the way up the river. They didn't know who he was; and oddly enough, there wasn't anything in his clothes or luggage to tell them. I know that to be a fact because, at Miss Margery's request, I helped her overhaul his belongings. Afterward, in a talk with him, I learned that he had been robbed on the train; or at least, that was the supposition. He said there was money in one of the suit-cases, and we didn't find any." "He is an author, they say; I don't seem to recall his name in any of my reading." The doctor laughed good-naturedly. "Perhaps he is only one of the would-be's; I don't think it has got much farther than the hankering, as yet. There was a book manuscript in one of his valises, and I read a little of it. It was pretty poor stuff, I thought. But what was your other shock?" "It was at the dinner-table; when you were joking him about the come-down from Mereside to us. Something he said--I couldn't remember, a minute afterward, just what it was--was spoken exactly in the voice, and with the same little trick of conciseness, as something that was said to me that never-to-be-forgotten evening on the saloon-deck promenade of the _Belle Julie_ ... said by the man whose name was _not_ John Wesley Gavitt." "Oh, my dear girl!" was the father's instant protest; "that couldn't be, you know!" "I know it couldn't," was the fair-minded rejoinder. "And I kept on telling myself so all the evening. I had to, father; for that once at the table wasn't the only time. Every few minutes he would say something to bring back that haunting half-recollection. It is only a coincidence, of course; it couldn't be anything else. But when he went away I couldn't help hoping that he would do one of two things; stay away altogether, or come often enough so that--oh, it's all nonsense, all of it: what difference can it make, to him or to me!" "No difference at all." Doctor Bertie's membership was in that large confraternity of fathers whose blindness on the side of sentiment where their own daughters are concerned has become proverbial. It was after he had taken up the latest copy of the _Lancet_ and was beginning to bury himself in the editorials, that Charlotte reopened the threshed-out subject with a belated query. "Did I understand you to say that he had lost all of his money?" "Yes; practically all of it," said the father, without losing his hold upon what a certain great London physician was saying through the columns of the English medical journal.