She listened to her father's uneven breathing and to his restless murmurs. Before creeping into her own cot across the room, she went softly to daddy's side and knelt on the floor. His face was flushed and his thick hair wet with perspiration. The barber had not been to shave him for two days, and Janice just knew the "prickles" on his face must feed very uncomfortable.
His head rolled from side to side upon the pillow. She wished she could do something to relieve him. She did not want to wake him up; but if she could only lave his face and hands with cool water—
Suddenly his mutterings became intelligible. Janice was held there on her knees—absorbed and almost breathless.
"Laura!"
The name was uttered so passionately—so reverently —that Janice found the tears spring unbidden to her eyes. Daddy had spoken her dead mother's name in his sleep. Indeed, it seemed as though he called to the loved one who had gone from them never to return.
"Laura!"
"Daddy!" breathed the girl. "It's me, not mamma! I— I'm all that's left to you!"
He seemed, even in his sleep, to have heard Janice's murmured words.
"All that was left to me," Broxton Day sighed, repeating, as Janice thought, what she had said. Or did he repeat Janice's words? "Your dear thoughts— and gone! gone! If I could only find them again. The box—Olga." His mutterings trailed off into unrecognizable delirium. He muttered, and his inflamed face moved from side to side upon the pillow. He did not know her at all this heartsick, sobbing little daughter!
For Janice could understand at last what went on in his poor, troubled brain. He was dreaming of the packet of letters—the letters that were so precious to Broxton Day. In the secret compartment of the lost treasure-box. In the fever of the man's brain nothing else seemed so important to him as his lost wife's letters!