"Yes."
"No, I hadn't forgotten."
"It was very noble; and so delicately chivalrous. It seems as if one who did such things would surely be helped in his own day of misfortune. But that doesn't often happen, I'm afraid."
"No," Constance assented, with a sigh; and Myra went back to the question of identity.
"I suppose there is no possible chance that Tommie may have been mistaken?"
Constance shook her head. "I think not; he saw that I was troubled about it, and he would have strained a point to comfort me if the facts had given him leave. But I shall be quite sure before I answer Dick's message."
With that thought in mind, and with no hope behind it, Constance waylaid her father in the hall the next morning as he was about to go out.
"Poppa, I want you to do something for me; no, not that"—the elderly man was feeling in his pockets for his check-book—"it is something very different, this time; different and—and rather dreadful. You remember the suicide you read about, yesterday morning?"
"Did I read about one? Oh, yes; the man that shot himself down on the Platte, or was it Cherry Creek? The fellow I thought might be Dick's friend. What about it?"
"It's that. We ought to make sure of it for Dick's sake, you know. Won't you go to the coroner's office and see if it is Mr. Jeffard? It's a horrible thing to ask you to do, but"—