"Ah! to be sure! You want advice?" seating himself comfortably. Her confusion was a pretty thing to watch, the red creeping up her neck into her face, blotting out its delicate tints, the uncertain glances, the full bitten lip. Doctor McCall quite forgot his own trouble in the keen pleasure of the sight.
"Perhaps—You do not quite understand my position here? Mr. Guinness is not my own father."
"No, I knew that."
"But you cannot know what he has been to me: I never knew until the last few days."
"Why within these few days, Miss Vogdes?"
"Because I saw you and Maria: I saw what love was. I began to think about it. I never have loved anybody but him," she went on headlong, utterly blind to all inferences. "There's a thing I can do for him, Doctor McCall, before I marry Mr. Muller, and I must do it. It will make his old age happier than any other part of his life has been."
McCall nodded, leaning forward. It was nothing but an imprudent girl dragging out her secrets before a stranger; nothing but a heated face, wet eyes, a sweet milky breath; but no tragedy he had ever seen on the stage had moved him so uncontrollably—no, not any crisis in his own life—with such delicious, inexplicable emotion.
"Well, what is it you can do?" after waiting for her to go on.
There was a moment's silence.
"My father," said Kitty, "had once a great trouble. It has made an old man of him before his time. I find that I can take it from him." She looked up at him with this. Now, there was a certain shrewd penetration under the softness of Kitty's eyes. Noting it, McCall instantly lost sight of her beauty and tears. He returned her look coolly.