"Of daddy? Hurrah!" Evelyn clapped her hands. "That was the one thing needed to complete my happiness! How is he? And where? Why hasn't he come to me himself?" she demanded impatiently of the stranger.
"Our friend here has traveled far," Maclane gently reminded her. "He is worn and spent."
"Oh, how thoughtless I am!" As Evelyn placed the newcomer in a comfortable chair she noticed that his features, as she saw them between his slouch hat and heavy beard, were pinched, and that his frame was bowed beyond his years, as if from recent suffering. "How tired you look! You have been ill?" she asked him considerately.
"He has undergone great hardships for the sake of a dearly loved daughter," Maclane hastened to explain. "He has escaped with but little besides his life. But for that let us give thanks. Let us make him feel that, so long as he is spared, his daughter will not mind poverty."
"To be sure!" Evelyn tried not to show the impatience she felt at the concerns of outsiders being placed before her own, with a touch of her old patronizing manner adding, "And I dare say my father and I can arrange matters so that this good man's daughter need not complain of poverty."
The stranger opened his lips to speak, but unable to command himself, turned his head aside with a slight groan.
With an inexplicable foreboding, Evelyn looked from him to Maclane, and in the latter's kind eyes reading a deep pity, "What is wrong?" she faltered. "Has anything happened to my father?"
"Nothing that sympathy and loving care cannot cure," replied the minister. "Mr. Durant was on his way to you a year ago when he fell into the power of ruffians, even as Travers, for his own evil purposes, informed you. After serious ill-treatment at their hands he escaped, but so broken in mind and body that for months he wandered about, unable to fix his own identity or put himself in communication with his friends. Now, thank God, he is almost cured."
"He shall be completely so, if, as you say, love can accomplish it." Evelyn started up. "I'll go to him at once." She addressed the stranger. "Where is he?"
"First——" Again Maclane hurriedly interposed. "There is something you should know about your father's finances. He is not rich, as you think him. By incessant toil from time to time he used to make vast sums, as miners are apt to do—and as miners are apt to do, he spent as fast as he made, his one extravagance being your pleasure. But the inexhaustible supply, the purse of Fortunatus—that was a fable that somehow grew up between your romanticism and his optimism. It does not exist. It never has existed. To-day he is absolutely penniless."