"It cannot be true, dad," she cried. "I have been one of your daughters all my life. Why should I be taken from you now?"
"I believe it is quite true," said Brand quietly, and the need there was to console her was beneficial to himself. "Mr. Traill speaks of proofs. You have met him. I exchanged barely a word, a glance, with him, but it is not believable that he would make these solemn statements without the most undeniable testimony."
"Indeed, Enid," murmured Constance, "it sounds like the truth, else he would never have spoken so definitely of my father's first claim on your affections."
Brand stroked the weeping girl's hair.
"One does not cry, little one, when one is suddenly endowed with a wealthy and distinguished relative. Now, I did not spring this revelation on you without a motive. If a cleavage has to come let us, at least, face every consideration. Providence, by inscrutable decree, ordained that my wife and I should meet after twenty-one years. That cannot have been a purposeless meeting. In my careless youth, when I assigned all things their scientific place, I have scoffed at presentiments and vague portents of coming evils. I retract the immature judgment then formed. During the height of the hurricane, when I feared the very lantern would be hurled into the sea, I was vouchsafed a spiritual warning. I could not read its import. These things baffle a man, especially one whose mind leans towards materialism. Nevertheless, I knew, though not in ordered comprehension, that my life was tending towards a supreme crisis. As the storm died, so I became normal, and I attributed a glimpse of the unseen to mere physical facts. I was wrong. The coming of that ill-fated vessel was heralded to me. I lacked the key of the hidden message. Now I possess it. On board that ship, Constance, was your mother. How strange that her advent should be bound up also with the mystery of Enid's parentage!"
"Father, dear, if you can bear it, tell me of my mother. She knew me, and that is why she asked me to kiss her."
"She asked you to kiss her?" Each word was a crescendo of surprise.
"Yes. One night she came to me. Oh, I remember. She wished Mr. Pyne to telegraph to his uncle. When he quitted us to take the message she, too—how weird it all seems now—admitted that she experienced something of the intuitive knowledge of the future you have just spoken of."
"I am not surprised. Poor Nanette! She was always a dreamer, in a sense. Never content, she longed for higher flights. She was a woman in ambition 'ere she ceased to be a child. When I married her, she was only eighteen. I was ten years older. My thought was to educate her to a somewhat higher ideal of life than the frivolities of a fashionable world. It was a mistake. If a girl harbors delusions before marriage the experience of married life is not a cure but an incentive. A less tolerant man would have made her a safer husband."
Constance would listen to nothing which would disparage him.