"I would even be glad"--and the old man hesitated with the timidity of one asking a heavy favor.--"Yes, I would be glad if you would go back there--oh, not often--but just once or twice to see that all was going on well." Cynthia's hand trembled for a moment. She looked at him with a sudden terror in her eyes. But he was lying now upon his side with his face to the window, and seeing things not to be seen through its panes. It cost Cynthia a great deal to make the promise he sought from her. She shrank from a return to the estancia with every fibre of her body. But she made it. He besought her in so wistful a voice. "Yes, I will go back, father." "Thank you," he said gently. Outside the window the snow lay white and deep upon the slate roofs of the outbuildings, and was piled upon the black branches of the trees. Overhead was a gray sky of winter. But for the glimmer of the snow it would almost have been dark. A smile shone again on the old man's face. "Perhaps Walton's cutting the corn to-day! Think of it!" he said, with a great longing, and before Cynthia's eyes there rose immediately the vision of a great glistening field of standing wheat and a reaping-machine like a black toy outlined against it. They remained thus in silence for a little while. Cynthia was thinking. "After all, he may not be in the Argentine.... I may not meet him.... He will have no power over me.... There is no reason why I should be afraid." And then, as though in answer to these arguments, Robert Daventry said: "You can go back now, Cynthia, without fear." The girl looked at him with startled eyes. Had she spoken aloud, she asked herself? Had she betrayed her secret just at this last moment? But her eyes fell upon the slip of paper in her hand, and there she saw written plainly under the word "estancia" the name "James Challoner." Robert Daventry looked toward a bureau which stood by the window. "The little drawer on the left. No, the one above that. There's a cutting from a newspaper." Cynthia found in the drawer half a column of a Spanish newspaper. The name was on the top of the column. It was a paper published in Buenos Ayres. She brought the cutting back to the bed and placed it between his fingers. "Yes, that's it," he said, and he lay back upon his pillows, and gathered his strength. "I have got to tell you now something which we have always kept a secret from you." "There is no need to tell it," said Cynthia. Robert Daventry stared at her. "If you do know it," he said slowly, "we have made the cruellest mistake we could possibly have made. You can't know it!" "It's about James Challoner--my father?" asked Cynthia, and Robert Daventry shut his eyes with a look of great distress upon his face. "How long have you known?" he asked.