“Daddy—Daddy is trying to come back to me,” she said very simply.
“Miss Bransby!” For a moment he wondered if Angela had been taking this overwrought child to materializing circles or trumpet mediums or some other such bosh. But no, Angela wouldn’t. She did the wildest things—small things—but in the important things she had the greatest good sense: he had proved it.
“Oh,” Helen assured him, “I am sure of it—I am sure of it. There’s something he wants me to do, but I can’t understand what it is. That is why I asked you to come here—I thought you might help me.”
Latham was moved, and perturbed. “My dear child,” he began lamely.
But Helen could brook no interruption now. Her words came fast enough, now she had started. “For weeks,” she insisted breathlessly, “I’ve had this feeling—for weeks I’ve known that he was doing his utmost to tell me something. At first I tried to put it aside. I thought it was my grief or my longing for him that deceived me into thinking this—but I couldn’t. It always came back stronger than ever—until to-day when I suddenly realized—I can’t tell you just how—there is something he wants me to do in the library.”
“My dear, my dear, my idle remarks have put these ideas in your head.” The doctor was thoroughly alarmed for her now, though still he could detect no hint of illness or disorder. “You are overwrought.”
“No, no!” the girl cried. “It isn’t that. It’s the strain of not being able to understand—it’s almost more than I can bear. Oh, Dr. Latham, can’t you help me to find out what it is that Daddy wants me to do?”
He studied her gravely—puzzled, troubled, strange thoughts surging in his mind. She seemed perfectly normal. And he knew that while love, religious mania, money troubles, filled insane asylums almost to bursting, that the percentage of patients so incarcerated as the result of spiritualism was almost nil, and quite negligible—general rumor notwithstanding. (Rumor’s a libelous jade.) He felt less sure of a right course than he often did. And he said sadly, but with little conviction, “I’m afraid I can’t help you, Miss Bransby.”
“But surely——” She rose and stood before him, her eyes flushed with entreaty, her clasped hands stretched toward him in pleading.
He rose too and laid a grave arm about her slight shoulder, saying tenderly, “What I said that night—it was no more than an idle speculation—I had no ground for it. And, naturally, your great grief coming so soon afterwards impressed my words upon your mind.”