"To find out about you."
"Why?"
As she hesitated, Avery put his hand upon her shoulder as though warning her to be still; but she went on, after only an instant.
"I promised Mr. Avery and the conductor," she said, "that if I saw you I would listen to what you had to say but would not answer questions without their consent; but I seem already to have broken that promise. I have been wondering, since we have found out what we have about you, whether Father could possibly have suspected that you were Mr. Warden's friend; but I am quite sure that was not the original reason for his inquiring about you. My Father thought he recognized your voice, Mr. Eaton, when you were speaking to the conductor about your tickets. He thought he ought to know who you were. He knew that some time and somewhere he had been near you before, and had heard you speak; but he could not tell where or when. And neither Mr. Avery nor I could tell him who you were; so he asked us to find out. I do not know whether, after we had described you to Father, he may have connected you with Mr. Warden or not; but that could not have been in his mind at first."
Eaton had paled; Avery had seemed about to interrupt her, but watching Eaton, he suddenly had desisted.
"You and Mr. Avery?" Eaton repeated. "He sent you to find out about me?"
"Sent me—in this case—more than Mr. Avery; because he thought it would be easier for me to do it." Harriet had reddened under Eaton's gaze. "You understand, Mr. Eaton, it was—was entirely impersonal with me. My Father, being blind, is obliged to use the eyes of others—mine, for one; he has trained me to see for him ever since we used to take walks together when I was a little girl, and he has made me learn to tell him what I see in detail, in the way that he would see it himself; and for helping him to see other things on which I might be unable to report so definitely and clearly, he has Mr. Avery. He calls us his eyes, sometimes; and it was only—only because I had been commissioned to find out about you that I was obliged to show so much curiosity."
"I understand," said Eaton quietly. "Your report to your father, I suppose, convinced him that he had been mistaken in thinking he knew my voice."
"No—not that. He knew that he had heard it; for sounds have so much meaning to him that he never neglects or forgets them, and he carries in his mind the voices of hundreds of different people and almost never makes a mistake among them. It did make him surer that you were not any one with whose voice he ought to have been familiar, but only some one whom he had heard say something—a few words or sentences, maybe—under conditions which impressed your voice upon his mind. And he told Mr. Avery so, and that has only made Mr. Avery and the conductor more certain that you must be the—one. And since you will not tell—"
"To tell would only further confirm them—"