“Vaguely.”
“Do you know that—”
“Do you know,” she interrupted, quietly, “that I used to have a brother?”
The question so took me by surprise that I answered, blankly, “No.”
“Yes, I had. He was nearly ten years older than I, which would make him about your age. He was—he was wild.”
“And is he—is he dead?”
“He shot himself—about five years ago. It was a terrible story, and I don’t want to tell it to you. I only want to say that my mother feels that if—if father hadn’t been so hard on him—if he’d played him along gently—he might easily have been saved. It’s what Mr. Christian—he’s had great experience in that sort of thing—he does a wonderful work among men that have gone under—but it’s what he used to tell father; only father hadn’t nearly so much patience with his own son as he would have had with some one else’s, and so— I wonder if you can understand that when mother heard that you had been—had been—well, a little like my brother—”
“Who told her?”
“Oh, I don’t know. These things get about. It might have been Annette.”
“And assuming that I was what you call wild, have you any idea how wild I was?”