' knife and was cutting away his sleeve,
half soaked with blood. He sighed and smiled a little sadly.

"So Sims hit me after all," he said. "It must be age. I was not so clumsy
once. The bandages, Brutus."

He watched us with a mild interest, and then his mind turned to other
matters, and he seemed regardless of the pain we caused him.

"My son," he said, turning to me, "you made a statement a while ago which
interested me strangely. I was preoccupied, and perhaps I did not hear
you aright, but it seemed you said I should know what had become of your
mother's money. What am I to understand by that?"

"You are hurt, sir," I replied. "Why go into a painful matter now?
We have kept it quiet long enough. Only three people knew that it
happened, and one of them is dead. Let us forget it, father. I am
willing if you are."

My father raised his eyebrows, and it seemed to me that pain had made
his face look older, and not even the smile on his lips concealed little
lines of suffering.

"And what are we to forget?" he asked.

"Surely you know," I said.

"No," said my father, "I do not. Out with it--what are we to forget?"

Was he still acting? Was it ever possible to understand him? Perhaps even
now he was turning the situation into a jest, and smiling to himself as
he watched me. And yet somehow I had ceased to hate him.

"Do you mean," I asked "that you never took it?"

Slowly my father's body straightened in his chair, and his lips, drawn
tight together, seemed to repress an exclamation.

"So he told you that," he said. "He told you that I made off with her
fortune? Gad! but he was clever, very, very clever."

He paused, and refilled his glass, and held it steadily before him.
His voice, when he spoke, was gentle, and, like his face, strung taut
with pain.

"No wonder she never sent me word," he murmured.

"Do you mean," I asked, "that you never took it?"

For a second he did not reply--only looked thoughtfully before him, as
if he saw something that we would never see.

"Why go into a painful matter now?" said my father at length. "Brutus,
call in Mr. Aiken."

He lurched into the cabin a half a minute later. His sea cloak was gone.
His shirt, none too white the previous afternoon, was torn and scraped as
though it had scrubbed the deck, and he had transferred his red
handkerchief from his neck to his head, so that his tangled hair waved
around it like some wild halo. His heavy hands, bruised and scarred