He interrupted this study, suddenly, to turn about and look back at Ethel; and again she was sure that he wished to return to her. But he waited; and the next moment one of his neighbors seized the opportunity to talk with a soldier just back from France; the man sat down beside him; and, as they talked, a group of others of the war-curious gathered.
Ethel leaned back, still stirred a little from her share in the peculiar event which had so surprisingly agitated him. It was plain that the fact of there being a place in the peninsula called St. Florentin—and near it an island called Resurrection Rock—had been, at the same time, incredible and of overwhelming importance to him. Also he possessed her father's name in some connection with that place,—her father, whom he had supposed to be living but whose name, he recollected, had been mentioned in a way which should have made him guess that her father was dead. His errand certainly was altogether unusual and suggestive of developments, of what sort she could not yet figure, but which might most powerfully affect the outcome of her own visit to St. Florentin this day.
A difficult visit that was to be, even at its best, she knew; for she was bound to St. Florentin to ask her grandfather to do the thing which, of all conceivable acts, he was least likely to do: to forward her money to the amount of many hundred thousands of dollars without security and with little likelihood of receiving it back. Moreover, since her father's death, she realized that in a way she had become the inheritor of his quarrel with her grandfather.
What was the cause of the quarrel, Ethel never knew; but she had known the fact of the trouble between grandfather and his brother John—and that
