rooding; the mouth
was gentle, rather kindly; it was a queerly impelling, haunting face.
This was his father! But, as Alan held the picture, gazing down upon
it, the only emotion which came to him was realization that he felt
none. He had not expected to know his father from strangers on the
street; but he had expected, when told that his father was before him,
to feel through and through him the call of a common blood. Now,
except for consternation at his own lack of feeling, he had no emotion
of any sort; he could not attach to this man, because he bore the name
which some one had told him was his father's, the passions which, when
dreaming of his father, he had felt.

As he looked up from the picture to the girl who had given it to him,
startled at himself and believing she must think his lack of feeling
strange and unnatural, he surprised her gazing at him with wetness in
her eyes. He fancied at first it must be for his father, and that the
picture had brought back poignantly her fears. But she was not looking
at the picture, but at him; and when his eyes met hers, she quickly
turned away.

His own eyes filled, and he choked. He wanted to thank her for her
manner to him in the afternoon, for defending his father and him, as
she had at the dinner table, and now for this unplanned, impulsive
sympathy when she saw how he had not been able to feel for this man who
was his father and how he was dismayed by it. But he could not put his
gratitude in words.

A servant's voice came from the door, startling him.

"Mrs. Sherrill wishes you told she is waiting, Miss Sherrill."

"I'll be there at once." Constance, also, seemed startled and
confused; but she delayed and looked back to Alan.

"If--if we fail to find your father," she said, "I want to tell you
what a man he was."

"Will you?" Alan asked. "Will you?"

She left him swiftly, and he heard her mother's voice in the hall. A
motor door closed sharply, after a minute or so; then the house door
closed. Alan stood still a moment longer, then, remembering the book
which he held, he drew a chair up to the light, and read the short, dry
biography of his father printed on the page opposite the portrait. It
summarized in a few hundred words his father's life. He turned to the
cover of the book and read its title, "Year Book of the Great Lakes,"
and a date of five years before; then he looked through it. It
consisted in large part, he saw, merely of lists o