"Ah!" laughed the sightless man, "he's already beginning to understand the feminine perverseness, eh? Well, my child, dine here with me if you wish, by all means. Tell Hill to lay the table for two. We have lots of work to do afterwards."
So the bell was rung again and Hill was informed that Miss Gabrielle would dine with her father in the library.
Then they turned again to the Baronet's mysterious private affairs; and when she had seated herself at the typewriter and re-read the reports—confidential reports they were, but framed in a manner which only the old man himself could understand—he dictated to her cryptic replies, the true nature of which were to her a mystery.
The last of the reports, brief and unsigned, read as follows:—
"Mon petit garçon est très gravement malade, et je supplie Dieu à genoux de ne pas me punir si severement, de ne pas me prendre mon enfant.
"D'apres le dernier bulletin du Professeur Knieberger, il a la fièvre scarlatine, et l'issue de la maladie est incertaine. Je ne quitte plus son chevet. Et sans cesse je me dis, 'C'est une punition du Ciel.'"
Gabrielle saw that, to the outside world, it was a statement by a frantic mother that her child had caught scarlet-fever. "What could it really mean?" she wondered.
Slowly she read it, and as she did so noticed the curious effect it had upon her father, seated as he was in the deep saddle-bag chair. His face grew very grave, his thin white hands clenched themselves, and there was an unusually bitter expression about his mouth.
"Eh?" he asked, as though not quite certain of the words. "Read it again, child, slower. I—I have to think."
She obeyed, wondering if the key to the cryptic message were contained in some conjunction of letters or words. It seemed as though, in imagination, he was setting it down before him as she pronounced the words. This was often so. At times he would have reports repeated to him over and over again.