“By Jove, isn’t it queer to find you here? and how white you are,” he said at last. “This will never do. I must get you away at once.”
“Not while Inez lives,” Fanny answered, in a tone Roy knew it was useless to combat.
“Is she so very low?” he asked. “Tell me all about it. You have written a good deal, and your mother told me a lot, but I want to hear it from you. It’s the strangest thing I ever heard.”
Fanny told him everything from the day she first saw Inez up to the present time. When she described the hold-up she was very earnest and dramatic, and Roy’s blood tingled with admiration for the heroic girl who had braved a masked robber and was perhaps paying for it with her life. Two or three times he asked questions which Fanny thought irrelevant to the subject, but for the most part he listened quietly till she was through.
“You are glad you have found your father?” he said, during a pause in the conversation.
“Glad? Of course. Why shouldn’t I be?” Fanny replied. “I once told you I believed I should find him. He is not like you, nor Judge Prescott, nor anybody I ever knew, but he is mine, and you must like him.”
“I intend to,” Roy said, “and now fire away at Tom. What is he like?”
If there was sarcasm intended Fanny did not know it, and answered readily, “He is nice, too,—though not like father. I don’t quite know what I mean, only he is different. I am sorry for him. He was to marry Inez, you know, and now that can never be, and what I don’t understand is that he seldom comes into her room, and when he does she is sure to have a chill. She used to ask me often where he was and when I said, ‘Do you want to see him?’ she’d say, ‘No, I only want to know if he has gone out.’ I told him of it and he said, a little irritably, ‘Tell her I’m always in the house.’ That seemed to quiet her. Strange, isn’t it?”
Before Roy could answer, Fanny exclaimed, “There’s father,” and Mark Hilton appeared, looking surprised at the sight of a young man, with his arm around his daughter.
“Father, this is Roy,—come all the way from Boston,” Fanny said, and the two men were soon shaking hands and looking keenly at each other in the moonlight which fell upon them.