“Still, I don’t see that you were so much to blame,” said Katherine soothingly.  “If the man was accused and could not clear himself, then plainly there was something wrong somewhere:  and after all you simply held your tongue; it was not as if you had stolen anything, letting the blame fall on him, or had falsely accused him in any way.”

“Just the arguments with which I comforted myself when I kept silent and profited by the downfall of a man who was blameless,” ’Duke Radford replied.  “But though there may be a sort of truth in them, it is not real truth, and I have been paying the price ever since of that guilty silence of mine.”

“Father, why do you tell me all this now?” cried Katherine protestingly.  Never in her heart would she have quite so much admiration for her father again, and the knowledge brought keen suffering with it.

He drew a long breath that was like a sobbing sigh; only too well did he understand what he had done, but he had counted the cost, and was not going to shirk the consequences.

“Because I’ve got the feeling that you will be able in some way to make the wrong right.  I don’t know how, and I can’t see what can be done, only somehow the conviction has grown to a certainty in my mind, and now I can rest about it,” he replied slowly.

“Has this trouble made you so restless and ill?” she asked, thinking that his burden of mental suffering had grown beyond his powers of endurance since he had been keeping his bed.

“I suppose it may have helped.  I have suffered horribly, but since I made up my mind to tell you, things have seemed easier, and I have been able to sleep,” he answered with a heavy sigh.

“Will you tell me just what you want me to do, if—­if——?” she began, but broke off abruptly, for she could not put in words the dread which had come into her heart that her father might be dead before the summer, when Mr. Selincourt was expected in Keewatin.

“If I am alive and well when the summer comes there will be no need for you to do anything; I shall be able to face the consequences of my own wrong-doing.  But if not, I leave it to you to do the very best you can.  You can’t make up for all the man may have had to suffer, but at least you can tell him that I was sorry.”

Katherine shuddered.  It was bad enough to be compelled to hear that her father had been guilty of such meanness as to keep silent, in order that he might profit by the downfall of an innocent man; but when, in addition to this, she was expected to tell that man of how her father had acted, and, as it were, ask pardon for it, the ordeal appeared beyond her strength to face.  Not a word of this did she say, however, for it was quite plain to her that the invalid had already over-excited himself, and she rather dreaded what Mrs. Burton would say presently.

“You must go to sleep, Father, and we will talk about this again another day,” she said firmly.