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I could not say anything to that, either; there were very few openings for me, it appeared, in the conversation, which remained one-sided as before.

“I went to the cemetery,” he continued. “I wanted to realize that those who had died were dead, it was all one thing as long as I was in there; everybody was dead; and then I came on to your house.”

The house he meant was a place I had taken for the summer a little out of town, so that I could run in to business every day, and yet have my mornings and evenings in the country; the fall had been so mild that we were still eking out the summer there.

“How did you know where I was staying?” I asked, with a willingness to make any occasion serve for saying something.

Tedham hesitated. “Well, I stopped at the office in Boston on my way out, and inquired. I was sure nobody would know me there.” He said this apologetically, as if he had been taking a liberty, and explained: “I wanted to see you very much, and I was afraid that if I let the day go by I should miss you somehow.”

“Oh, all right,” I said.

We had remained standing at the point where I had gone round to meet him, and it seemed, in the awkward silence that now followed, as if I were rooted there. I would very willingly have said something leading, for my own sake, if not for his, but I had nothing in mind but that I had better keep there, and so I waited for him to speak. I believed he was beating about the bush in his own thoughts, to find some indirect or sinuous way of getting at what he wanted to know, and that it was only because he failed that he asked bluntly, “March, do you know where my daughter is?”

“No, Tedham, I don’t,” I said, and I was glad that I could say it both with honesty and with compassion. I was truly sorry for the man; in a way, I did pity him; at the same time I did not wish to be mixed up in his affairs; in washing my hands of them, I preferred that there should be no stain of falsehood left on them.

“Where is my sister-in-law?” he asked next, and now at least I could not censure him for indirection.

“I haven’t met her for several years,” I answered. “I couldn’t say from my own knowledge where she was.”

“But you haven’t heard of her leaving Somerville?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Do you ever meet her husband?”

“Yes, sometimes, on the street; but I think not lately; we don’t often meet.”

“The last time you saw her, did she speak of me?”

“I don’t know–I believe–yes. It was a good many years ago.”

“Was she changed toward me at all?”

This was a hard question to answer, but I thought I had better answer it with the exact truth. “No, she seemed to feel just the same as ever about it.”

I do not believe Tedham cared for this, after all, though he made a show of having to collect himself before he went on. “Then you think my daughter is with her?”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t know anything about it.”

“March,” he urged, “don’t you think I have a right to see my daughter?”

“That’s something I can’t enter into, Tedham.”

“Good God!” said the man. “If you were in my place, wouldn’t you want to see her? You know how fond I used to be of her; and she is all that I have got left in the world.”

I did indeed remember Tedham’s affection for his daughter, whom I remembered as in short frocks when I last saw them together. It was before my own door in town. Tedham had driven up in a smart buggy behind a slim sorrel, and I came out, at a sign he made me through the bow-window with his whip, and saw the little maid on the seat there beside him. They were both very well dressed, though still in mourning for the child’s mother, and the whole turnout was handsomely set up. Tedham was then about thirty-five, and the child looked about nine. The color of her hair was the color of his fine brown beard, which had as yet no trace of gray in it; but the light in her eyes was another light, and her smile, which was of the same shape as his, was of another quality, as she leaned across him and gave me her pretty little gloved hand with a gay laugh. “I should think you would be afraid of such a fiery sorrel dragon as that,” I said, in recognition of the colt’s lifting and twitching with impatience as we talked.