“Thank you, dear, I felt I could trust you,” he said simply, and the words braced Katherine for bearing what had to come, more than anything else could have done.

“What is it you want me to know?” she asked, for he had lain for some minutes without speech, as if the task he had set himself was harder than he could perform.

“I wanted to tell you about the wrong I did Selincourt,” the sick man said in a reluctant tone.  He had brought himself to the point of confiding in his daughter, yet even now he shrank from it as if fearing to lower himself in her eyes.  “We were clerks in one business house, only Selincourt was above me, and taking a much higher salary; but if anything happened to move him, I knew that his desk would be offered to me.  I was poor, but he in a sense was poorer still, because he had an invalid father and young sisters dependent on him.”

“Father, surely there is no need to tell me of this dead-and-buried action, unless you wish it, for the telling can do no good now,” burst out Katherine, who could not bear to see the pain in her father’s face.

“A wrong is never dead and buried while the man lives who did it,” ’Duke Radford answered with a wan smile, “for his conscience has a trick of rounding on him when he least expects it, and then there is trouble, at least that is how it has been with me.  One day a complaint was lodged with our business chiefs that one of the clerks had been gambling, was an habitual gambler in fact.  I was not the one, and I was not suspected, but I knew very well which one it was; but when suspicion fell on Selincourt, I just kept silent.  For some reason he could not clear himself, was dismissed, and I was promoted.  But the promotion did me little good; the firm went bankrupt in the following year, and I was adrift myself.”

“What became of Selincourt?” asked Katherine, and was instantly sorry she had spoken, because of the pain in her father’s face.

“I don’t know.  I never heard of him from the day he left the counting-house until Astor M’Kree read his name from that letter, but I thought of him a good bit.  It is hard enough for a man to do well with an unblemished character, but to be thrown out of a situation branded as a gambler is ruin, and nothing short of it.”

“What became of the other man—­the one who was a gambler?” asked Katherine.

“I don’t know.  He remained with the firm until the crash came.  I fancy Selincourt’s fate made a great impression on him, for I never heard of his gambling after Selincourt’s dismissal,” answered her father.

“How strange that he could not clear himself!  Do you expect he had been gambling really, as well as the other one?” Katherine said quickly.

“I am sure he had not,” replied ’Duke Radford.  “He was not that sort at all.  But the thing that bowled him over was that he was known to have money in his possession, a considerable amount, for which he could not or would not account.”