"Mr. Grandon, I thank you most kindly for your quick response. Sit down here.—Now you can leave us, Denise. I shall want nothing but my drops."
"I am afraid you are hardly able——"
"Mr. Grandon, when a man's life comes to be told off by days, he must do his work quickly, not daring to count on any future. I had hoped—but we must to business. Come nearer. Sit there in the light. No, you are not much like your father, and yet totally unlike your brother. I think I can trust you. I must, for there is nothing left, nothing!"
"You can trust me," Floyd Grandon says, in a tone that at once establishes confidence.
"And one could trust your father to the uttermost. If he had but lived!"
"No one regrets that more bitterly than I, and I thank you for the kindly praise."
"A good man, a just man. And now he has left all to you, and it is a strange, tangled mass. I meant to help, but alas, I shall soon be beyond help." And the brow knits itself in anxious lines, while the eyes question with a vague fear.
"If you could explain a little of the trouble. I am no mechanic, and yet I have dabbled into scientific matters. But you are too ill."
A spasm passes over his face, leaving it blue and pinched, and St. Vincent makes a gasp for breath.
"No. I shall never be better. Do not be alarmed, that was only a trifle. You have seen Wilmarth, and he has told you; but the thing is not a failure, it cannot be! There were some slight miscalculations which I have remedied. If I could find some one to whom I could explain my plans——"