In a little room high up in the house, her very own sitting-room, heaped with roses and heliotrope and carnations, its windows looking out to the Surrey hills and a gurgling brook—blue as steel in the winter cold, its snow-white banks edged with irregular shrubberies icicle-hung, Helen and Latham sat in close conference.

A glorious fire flamed on the broad hearth in the corner. Helen had inherited her father’s love of fires. When the war came, crippling their servant staff both at Curzon Street and at Deep Dale, and making the replenishing of coal cellars arduous, and posters on every hoarding admonished patriotism to economize fuel, Richard Bransby had installed a gas-fire in his library. Helen had opposed this, she had so loved the great mixed fire of logs and of coal before which so many of her childhood’s gloamings had been spent, so many of her acute young dreams dreamed, but for once the father had not yielded to her. In one particular the gas-fire had appealed to him—it minimized the intrusions of servants when he best liked to have his “den” to himself. Humbly born, but with none of the excrescent caddishness of smaller-souled nouveaux riches, he had no liking for the visible presence of his domestic retinue, and when servants were ill-trained and imperfectly unobtrusive, little irritated him more than to have them about, and, except by Helen, he was a man easily irritated. So gas had replaced wood and anthracite in his room. But not so in Helen’s. She meant well by her country, but the logs piled high on her hearth. The patriotisms of youth are apt to be thoughtless, in every country. Often Youth makes the great sacrifice—England needs no telling of that—but Age makes the ten thousand daily burnt-offerings that in their infinite aggregate heap high in the scale of a people’s devotion; and, perhaps, win as tender approval from the Angel that records.

The morning sun streamed in riotously. A room could not be prettier or more cozy. It made a brilliant background to the slender, black-clad girl-figure, and the handsome, middle-aged man, dressed as carefully as she—in a gray morning suit—and almost as slender. Dr. Latham took every care of his figure.

“I hope you are not going to be angry with me,” Helen said, looking at him a little ruefully.

“My dear child!”

“Because, you see, I have brought you here under false pretenses.”

“False pretenses!” her old friend laughed contentedly, “that’s actionable.”

“I’m not ill. It isn’t about my health I want to see you.”

“Then I’ve lost a very attractive patient,” he mocked at her in affectionate retort.

“Don’t joke—please. It is very serious.”

“So you wrote.”

“And I didn’t say I was ill. But, of course, that would be what you thought, when I begged you to come for a few days, and knowing how busy you always are, and asking you to say nothing to Aunt Caroline or any one, but just seem to be on an ordinary visit.”

“I was delighted to come,” he assured her gravely. “And, as it happens, I did not think you were ill.”

“No?”

“No.”

“How was that, Dr. Latham?”

“Can’t say in the least; but I didn’t. And—now—well—tell me.”

“It’s about something you once said.”

He wondered if it were something he had said about Angela Hilary. He hoped not. He had said some very foolish things—but that was long ago—before he really knew that radiant woman. “Something I once said?” he echoed a little anxiously.

Helen nodded.

“I am afraid I don’t remember. What was it?”

“That night that——” But she choked at the words. For a moment she could not speak. Latham gave her time. He was used to giving people time—and especially women. Presently she went on, finding another way to put it—“That last night—when you spoke of the dead coming back. You said that if two people loved each other very dearly, and one was left behind and needed the one who had gone, he would come back.”

“I said he might try,” Latham corrected her gently.

“You were right.”

“What do you mean?” The man was half amused, half startled, but the physician was anxious.

“Daddy—Daddy is trying to come back to me,” she said very simply.

“Miss Bransby!” For a moment he wondered if Angela had been taking this overwrought child to materializing circles or trumpet mediums or some other such bosh. But no, Angela wouldn’t. She did the wildest things—small things—but in the important things she had the greatest good sense: he had proved it.

“Oh,” Helen assured him, “I am sure of it—I am sure of it. There’s something he wants me to do, but I can’t understand what it is. That is why I asked you to come here—I thought you might help me.”

Latham was moved, and perturbed. “My dear child,” he began lamely.

But Helen could brook no interruption now. Her words came fast enough, now she had started. “For weeks,” she insisted breathlessly, “I’ve had this feeling—for weeks I’ve known that he was doing his utmost to tell me something. At first I tried to put it aside. I thought it was my grief or my longing for him that deceived me into thinking this—but I couldn’t. It always came back stronger than ever—until to-day when I suddenly realized—I can’t tell you just how—there is something he wants me to do in the library.”

“My dear, my dear, my idle remarks have put these ideas in your head.” The doctor was thoroughly alarmed for her now, though still he could detect no hint of illness or disorder. “You are overwrought.”

“No, no!” the girl cried. “It isn’t that. It’s the strain of not being able to understand—it’s almost more than I can bear. Oh, Dr. Latham, can’t you help me to find out what it is that Daddy wants me to do?”

He studied her gravely—puzzled, troubled, strange thoughts surging in his mind. She seemed perfectly normal. And he knew that while love, religious mania, money troubles, filled insane asylums almost to bursting, that the percentage of patients so incarcerated as the result of spiritualism was almost nil, and quite negligible—general rumor notwithstanding. (Rumor’s a libelous jade.) He felt less sure of a right course than he often did. And he said sadly, but with little conviction, “I’m afraid I can’t help you, Miss Bransby.”

“But surely——” She rose and stood before him, her eyes flushed with entreaty, her clasped hands stretched toward him in pleading.

He rose too and laid a grave arm about her slight shoulder, saying tenderly, “What I said that night—it was no more than an idle speculation—I had no ground for it. And, naturally, your great grief coming so soon afterwards impressed my words upon your mind.”

“Oh, no——” Helen said, her tears gathering.

“Come! come!” Latham coaxed her. “You’re imagining things.”

She pulled from his arm, and moved to the window, answering him almost violently, “No, no! It’s too vivid—it’s too real!”

“But surely,” he urged, “if your father could bring you to this house, direct you to the library—you said the library?”—she nodded her head emphatically—“he could tell you what he wanted you to do there. You have had to bear a great sorrow—it has unsettled you and given you this delusion—a delusion that comes to so many people who have lost what you have lost; you must conquer it!”

Perhaps he might have convinced and influenced her more, had he been more convinced himself, had she convinced and influenced him less. She persisted with him, wearily. “But—don’t you see? I thought you would see. Oh, please try to see. If I lose this—I lose—everything. I was so sure it was about Hugh—I was so sure Daddy was going to bring him back to me.” She sat down by the fire crying piteously now.

Latham’s own eyes felt odd. He knelt down on the hearthrug, and gathered her hands into his. “Poor child!” It was all he could say. What else was there to say?

She looked at him desperately. “Then you don’t believe?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” he admitted—very softly.

He saw her mouth quiver, and then the sobs came thick and fast, and she hid her face on his shoulder.