"I don't think you ought to talk at all," she said, in a doubtful tone. "Drink this broth, dear, and then try to sleep again."
"I will drink the broth, but I don't want to go to sleep again just yet," he said, in a stronger voice.
Katherine fed him as if he were a baby, and indeed he was almost as weak as an infant. But she did not encourage his talking, although she could not prevent it, as he seemed so much better.
"There is something that has been troubling me a great deal, and I want to tell you about it," he said. "I could not speak of it to anyone else, and I don't want you to do so either. But it will be a certain comfort to me that you know it, for you are strong and more fitted for bearing burdens than Nellie, who has had more than her share of sorrow already."
Katherine shivered. There was a longing in her heart to tell her father that she wanted no more burdens, that life was already so hard as to make her shrink from any more responsibility. But, looking at him as he lay there in his weakness, she could not say such words as these.
"What is it you want to tell me, Father?" she asked. Her voice was tender and caressing; he should never have to guess how she shrank from the confidence he wanted to give her, because her instinct told her that it was something which she would not want to hear.
"Do you remember the day we went up to Astor M'Kree's with the last mail which came through before the waters closed?" he said abruptly, and again Katherine shivered, knowing for a certainty that her father's trouble was proving too big for him alone.
"Yes, I remember," she replied very softly,
"That was a black day for me, for it brought dead things to life in a way that I had thought impossible. I used to know that Oswald Selincourt who has bought the fishing fleet."
"That one? Are you sure it is the same?" she asked in surprise. "The name is uncommon, still it is within the bounds of probability that there might be two, and you said the one you knew was a poor man."