t 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 gambl