“Poor little sing! but too big to tumble about. Det up again and don’t ky. Julia,” he put out his hand again and laid it on the elbow of Mrs. Harwood’s chair, “these are all then?--between you and me----” He rubbed his long soft pallid hands. “Who would have thought,” he said, “that I should have got so well, and come downstairs again and sat by you in another chair, and seen them all men and women. It’s more than we could have expected--more than we could have expected. And now there’s a great deal to be done to show that we’re thankful. Where is my pocket-book? I want my pocketbook. God in heaven! that villain Vicars has taken my pocket-book, and now I shall not be able to pay!” He started up again in rising excitement, his eyes beginning to stare and his face to redden, while he dragged and pulled at the pockets of his coat. Mrs. Harwood put her hand upon him to pull him down into his chair, and called to them all to find Vicars. “Sit down, sit down, Adolphus,” she said, holding him with both her hands. “It is in your other coat. You changed your other coat to come down, you know you did. Run--run, Dolff! for the love of heaven, and get the pocket-book out of your father’s other coat!” CHAPTER XLVIII. Dolff hurried out of the room so bewildered and dazed that he neither understood what this new revelation was, nor what he was sent out to do. He felt himself hustled out of the room by his anxious sisters, while Meredith was left to be the defender of the party against the madman. The madman! What was it his mother had said. To fetch Vicars--but that was not all--to get something out of his father’s coat. His father! Dolff stopped a few steps from the door, out of which he had been thrust to run in haste and bring what was wanted out of his father’s coat. “My father,” Dolff said to himself, “has been dead since ever I can remember. Who is my father?” He was completely bewildered. He remembered his mother very well in her widow’s cap. And she was known everywhere to be a widow. “Your father!”--he could not think what it meant. He believed there must be some mistake, some strange illusion which had fallen upon them, or which, perhaps, they had thought of, invented, to prevent remark. “Your father!” could it have been said only to shut his mouth?