From Mr. Myers he could only learn that the father and mother of Robert and Charles Brierly were of good families, well known in their respective states, and both, he believed, "were as distinctly Americans as the war of the Revolution could make any American citizen of English descent." As to Charlie Brierly, Myers "didn't believe the boy had ever looked twice at a girl until he met with that lovely, sad-eyed sweetheart who, it was plain, was wearing out her heart in silent grief for him."
Then Ferrars went to see his supposed cousin, and asked her to review, mentally, her latest talks with her lover, and to see if she could not recall some mention of a discovery, a surprise, a perplexity possibly, which he wished to lay before his brother when he should come. But she shook her head sadly.
"Was he, to her knowledge, in the habit of collecting odd things from the newspapers?"
She shook her head. "He did not think very highly of our daily papers, and seldom if ever read beyond the news of the day. The scandals and criminal reports he abhorred," she said.
"And he never alluded in any way to his family history, you say? Think, was there no mention of family facts or names?"
She looked up after some moments of thought. "I can only recall one thing which, after all, does not contain information, except as regards the two brothers. Charlie was speaking of the difference of their temperaments. Robert, he said, was intensely practical, living in and enjoying most, the present, and by anticipation, the future, while he (Charlie) was a dreamer, loving the past, and idealising its history. To illustrate, he told how, as boys, he loved to hear his mother, whom I fancy he resembled, tell the tales she had heard at her grandmother's knee, of the early days, the French convents, the Indians, the colonists, the quaint living, the speech, which had for him such charms, while Robert would only hear of the fighting and would run away from the ancestral history."
Hilda, grown accustomed to his numerous queries and scant explanations, was not surprised at Ferrars' hurried departure at the end of the catechism, and he went back to the doctor's cottage with just one faint little possibility as a reward for all this interviewing. He had known Mr. Myers in the city, as a successful detective is apt to know an able lawyer, well by reputation and personally a little, and he was glad to find in him a friend to the Brierlys, dead and living.
Going back that night he said to himself:
"It's of no use to try to go on like this; a confidant will save me a lot of time, and Myers is the man. I can't call upon the doctor; he's got his profession, and he belongs here. Myers can make my business and Brierly's his at need. Besides, he's a lawyer and won't be knocked entirely out by my wild theorising, and he's the one man who can get access to the ancestral documents at need."
He found the lawyer still upon the doctor's piazza, and without the least attempt at explanation invited him into his own room, where they were still closeted when, at midnight, Robert Brierly went slowly toward the Fry cottage, and the doctor, who never got his full quota of sleep, went yawning off to bed.