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Mr. Sutherland, who had found his faculties confused by the expression he had surprised on the young girl's face, answered with a divided attention:

"And I have a message to give you. Wait outside on the porch for me, Frederick, till I exchange a word with our little friend here."

Agnes, who had thrust something she held into a box that lay beside her on a table, turned with a confused blush to listen.

Mr. Sutherland waited till Frederick had stepped into the hall. Then he drew Agnes to one side and remorselessly, persistently, raised her face toward him till she was forced to meet his benevolent but searching regard.

"Do you know," he whispered, in what he endeavoured to make a bantering tone, "how very few days it is since that unhappy boy yonder confessed his love for a young lady whose name I cannot bring myself to utter in your presence?"

The intent was kind, but the effect was unexpectedly cruel. With a droop of her head and a hurried gasp which conveyed a mixture of entreaty and reproach, Agnes drew back in a vague endeavour to hide her sudden uneasiness. He saw his mistake, and let his hands drop.

"Don't, my dear," he whispered. "I had no idea it would hurt you to hear this. You have always seemed indifferent, hard even, toward my scapegrace son. And this was right, for--for--" What could he say, how express one-tenth of that with which his breast was labouring! He could not, he dared not, so ended, as we have intimated, by a confused stammering.

Agnes, who had never before seen this object of her lifelong admiration under any serious emotion, felt an impulse of remorse, as if she herself had been guilty of occasioning him embarrassment. Plucking up her courage, she wistfully eyed him.

"Did you imagine," she murmured, "that I needed any warning against Frederick, who has never honoured me with his regard, as he has the young lady you cannot mention? I'm afraid you don't know me, Mr. Sutherland, notwithstanding I have sat on your knee and sometimes plucked at your beard in my infantile insistence upon attention."

"I am afraid I don't know you," he answered. "I feel that I know nobody now, not even my son."

He had hoped she would look up at this, but she did not.

"Will my little girl think me very curious and very impertinent if I ask her what my son Frederick was saying when I came into the room?"

She looked up now, and with visible candour answered him immediately and to the point:

"Frederick is in trouble, Mr. Sutherland. He has felt the need of a friend who could appreciate this, and he has asked me to be that friend. Besides, he brought me a packet of letters which he entreated me to keep for him. I took them, Mr. Sutherland, and I will keep them as he asked me to do, safe from everybody's inspection, even my own."

Oh! why had he questioned her? He did not want to know of these letters; he did not want to know that Frederick possessed anything which he was afraid to retain in his own possession.

"My son did wrong," said he, "to confide anything to your care which he did not desire to retain in his own home. I feel that I ought to see these letters, for if my son is in trouble, as you say, I, his father, ought to know it."

"I am not sure about that," she smiled. "His trouble may be of a different nature than you imagine. Frederick has led a life that he regrets. I think his chief source of suffering lies in the fact that it is so hard for him to make others believe that he means to do differently in the future."

"Does he mean to do differently?"

She flushed. "He says so, Mr. Sutherland. And I, for one, cannot help believing him. Don't you see that he begins to look like another man?"

Mr. Sutherland was taken aback. He had noticed this fact, and had found it a hard one to understand. To ascertain what her explanation of it might be, he replied at once:

"There is a change in him--a very evident change. What is the occasion of it? To what do you ascribe it, Agnes?"

How breathlessly he waited for her answer! Had she any suspicion