As he left the hotel, Anderson found himself intercepted by Delaine in the garden, and paused at once to give him the latest news.
"The report is really good, everything considered," he said, with a cordiality born of their common anxiety; and he repeated the doctor's last words to himself.
"Excellent!" said Delaine; then, clearing his throat, "Mr. Anderson, may I have some conversation with you?"
Anderson looked surprised, threw him a keen glance, and invited him to accompany him part of the way to Laggan. They turned into a solitary road, running between the woods. It was late evening, and the sun was striking through the Laggan valley beneath them in low shafts of gold and purple.
"I am afraid what I have to say will be disagreeable to you," began Delaine, abruptly. "And on this particular day--when we owe you so much--it is more than disagreeable to myself. But I have no choice. By some extraordinary chance, with which I beg you to believe my own will has had nothing to do, I have become acquainted with something--something that concerns you privately--something that I fear will be a great shock to you."
Anderson stood still.
"What can you possibly mean?" he said, in growing amazement.
"I was accosted the night before last, as I was strolling along the railway line, by a man I had never seen before, a man who--pardon me, it is most painful to me to seem to be interfering with anyone's private affairs--who announced himself as"--the speaker's nervous stammer intervened before he jerked out the words--"as your father!"
"As my father? Somebody must be mad!" said Anderson quietly. "My father has been dead ten years."
"I am afraid there is a mistake. The man who spoke to me is aware that you suppose him dead--he had his own reasons, he declares, for allowing you to remain under a misconception; he now wishes to reopen communications with you, and to my great regret, to my indignation, I may say he chose me--an entire stranger--as his intermediary. He seems to have watched our party all the way from Winnipeg, where he first saw you, casually, in the street. Naturally I tried to escape from him--to refer him to you. But I could not possibly escape from him, at night, with no road for either of us but the railway line. I was at his mercy."