had had a shock.

"Come over here and sit beside me a moment, young man--I--I've--I'm
not feeling as strong as I look. I--I've a thing to tell you. Sit
down--sit down. We are alone? Yes. Every one's gone to the trial. I'm
on here from the West myself to attend it."

"The trial! What trial?"

"You've heard nothing of it? I was thinking maybe you were also--were
drawn here--you've but just come?"

"I've been here long enough to engage a room--which I shan't want
long. No, I've come for no trial exactly--maybe it might come to
that--? What have you to tell me?"

But Larry Kildene sat silent for a time before replying. An eager joy
had seized him, and a strange reticence held his tongue tied, a fear
of making himself known to this son whom he had never seen since he
had held him in his arms, a weak, wailing infant, thinking only of his
own loss. This dignified, stalwart young man, so pleasant to look
upon--no wonder the joy of his heart was a terrible joy, a hungering,
longing joy akin to pain! How should he make himself known? In what
words? A thousand thoughts crowded upon him. From Betty's letter he
knew something of the contention now going on in the court room, and
from the landlord last evening he had heard more, and he was impatient
to get to the trial.

Now this encounter with his own son,--the only one who could set all
right,--and who yet did not know of the happenings which so
imperatively required his presence in the court room, set Larry
Kildene's thoughts stammering and tripping over each other in such a
confusion of haste, and with it all the shyness before the great fact
of his unconfessed fatherhood, so overwhelmed him, that for once his
facile Irish nature did not help him. He was at a loss for words,
strangely abashed before this gentle-voiced, frank-faced, altogether
likable son of his. So he temporized and beat about the bush, and did
not touch first on that which was nearest his heart.

"Yes, yes. I've a thing to tell you. You came here to be at
a--a--trial--did you say, or intimate it might be? If--if--you'll tell
me a bit more, I maybe can help you--for I've seen a good bit of the
world. It's a strange trial going on here now--I've come to hear."

"Tell me something about it," said Richard, humoring the older man's
deliberation in arriving at his point.

"It's little I know yet. I've come to learn, for I'm interested in the
young man they're trying to convict. He's a sort of a relative of