“If he goes, I go too,” Nellie answered.
“In that case,” said Vickers, “of course he must be allowed to stay, but perhaps you will be so good as to ask him, if he must be here, not to interrupt——”
“Come, come,” said Overton hastily, “can’t we effect some compromise in this matter? As I understand it, Mr. Emmons believes that certain sums are owed Miss Nellie by you——”
“Compromise be damned, Overton,” said Vickers. “You know this money is not mine, and I won’t touch it.”
Nellie started up. “The money is yours, Bob. My uncle would never have pinched and saved to pay me back. The money exists only because he loved you so much. It is yours.”
Vickers smiled at her. “I am glad,” he said, “that I do not have to argue that extremely sophistical point with you. The reason that the money is not mine is—I hate to repeat a statement that you asked me not to make again—but I am not Bob Lee.”
He had the satisfaction of seeing that, for the first time, she weighed the possibility of the assertion’s being true.
“What does he mean, Mr. Overton?” she asked.
“He means he is not the person he represented himself as being.”
“What is this?” cried Emmons, who had remained silent hitherto only from a species of stupefaction. “Is he trying to make us believe that his own father did not know him? What folly! How frivolous!”