his?"

"No; at least, not very much of it."

Miss Grierson went on smoothly, falling sympathetically into the
reminiscent vein.

"Kenneth went to college without ever having known what it was to lack
anything in reason that money could buy. A little while after he was
graduated his father died."

"Leaving Kenneth poor, I suppose; he has intimated as much to me, once
or twice," said Raymer.

"Leaving him awfully poor. He wanted to learn to write, and for a long
time he stayed on in New York, living just any old way, and having a
dreadfully hard time of it, I imagine, though he would never say much
about that part of it. He says he was studying the under-dog, and he has
told me some of the most harrowing things he has seen and been through:
one of them had a little child in it--a baby that he found in a tenement
where the father and mother had both died of starvation ... think of it!
And he took the baby away and fed it and kept it...."

Broffin, sitting behind the window draperies, had his elbows on his
knees and his head tightly clamped between his hands. He was striving,
as the dying strive for breath, to remember. Where had he heard this
self-same story of the man who had fought some sort of a studying fight
in the back-water of the New York slums? In every detail it came back to
him like the recurring scenes of a vivid dream; but the key-notes of
time, place, and the man's identity were gone; lost beyond any power of
the groping mentality to recall them.

"That is why he thinks he is a Socialist," Miss Grierson was going on
evenly. "I've been wondering if you knew these things, and I've wanted
to tell you. I've thought it might help you to understand him better if
you knew something of what he has been through. But we were talking
about my dreadful suspicion. It persisted, you know, right along through
everything. At last, I felt that I just _must_ know, at whatever cost.
One day when we were driving, I brought him here and--and introduced him
to Mr. Galbraith. I was so scared that I could taste it--but I did it!"

Raymer laughed. "Of course, nothing came of it?"

"Nothing at all; and the reaction pretty nearly made me faint. They just
made talk, like any two freshly introduced people would, and that was
all there was of it. You'd say that was proof enough, wouldn't you?
Surely Mr. Galbraith would recognize the man who robbed him?"

"Certainly; there couldn't be any doubt of that."

"That's what I said.