Blythe walked to the window and looked out over the Park for a silent moment. Then he thrust his hand into his breast pocket, brought out a photograph, and handed it to her.
"I came upon the picture this morning in rummaging through my safe," he said to her.
Louise gazed puzzledly at the photograph. It was that of a tall, distinguished-looking man with silvered hair and mustache, dressed in white linen; he was shown standing on the porch of a squat, wide, comfortable-looking bungalow, the open space in front of which was a riot of tropical verdure.
Louise glanced up at Blythe, and her eyes filled.
"You must not think it odd that I did not give it to you before this," said Blythe, fighting a bit of a lump in his throat. "I've been spending at least two hours every day searching for it ever since—well, ever since I met you on the train," he admitted, his cheeks tingling with the confession.
"When was it taken? And is he so—so glorious-looking as this?" asked Louise, her enthusiasm over her father's photograph—the first she had ever seen of him, for her mother had resentfully destroyed the earlier ones—overcoming her hardly-maintained restraint.
Blythe sat down beside her and told her about the picture. He had gotten it from her father upon the occasion of his visit to Honolulu nearly three years before. Blythe had been summoned to California on some legal business, and, a bit run down from over work, he had made the six-day cruise down to Honolulu, partly for recuperation and partly to go over some affairs with George Treharne. Treharne had come from his plantations on the Island of Maui to meet him in Honolulu. Louise sat rapt for more than half an hour while Blythe answered her eager questions about her father. He had felt a delicacy about expanding on that subject so long as the girl was domiciled with her mother; now, however, that Louise had been literally forced to the severance of at least her constant propinquity to her mother, and, now, too, that he was her guardian in fact instead of in prospect, he felt at liberty to throw off that reserve; and he keenly enjoyed the absorption with which she listened to his account of her father, nearly every detail of which was absolutely new to her.
"How I should love to see him!" Louise exclaimed, sighing, when at length Blythe rose to leave.
"I am promising myself the intense satisfaction and pleasure of taking you to see him, Louise—some day," Blythe said, tacking on the last two words when he caught her scarlet flush. It was not until after he had spoken that he reflected that what he had said might easily be open to one very lucid and palpable interpretation; but that interpretation so fitted in with what he meant to encompass, all conditions being fair and equal, that he refused to stultify himself by modifying or withdrawing his words. And Louise's beauty was heightened when she flushed in that way, anyhow!
Laura, with the skillfully-assumed air of one who had been excessively busy, came in at that moment.