"Perhaps so. Yes, indeed I think it must be so, otherwise I don't see how I could have pulled through. I have recalled a good deal about that time since I have been here at Roaring Water Portage, and have seen how you have had to work, and to sacrifice yourself for the good of others; and I have often thought that I should like to tell you the story of my struggle. Would you care to hear it?"
"Yes, very much," Katherine answered faintly, although, much as she wished to know all about it, she dreaded hearing the story of her father's wrong-doing told by other lips than his own.
"When I was a very young man I was clerk in a Bristol business house, taking a good salary, and, as I believed, with an unblemished character. My father was dependent on me, and two young sisters, and I was rather proud of being, as it were, the keystone of the home. Then one day an old friend of my father's came to see me, and paid me fifty pounds, which he said he had owed to my father for twenty years—a gambling debt. He begged and implored me to say no word about it to anyone, especially to my father."
"Why not, if it was your father's debt?" asked Katherine, who was keenly interested.
"Because my father would not have taken it, although twenty years before he had paid the fifty pounds out of his own pocket, to save this friend of his from exposure and ruin. At first I was disposed not to take it either; but, as the man represented to me, I had others dependent on me, and for their sakes I was in duty bound to take it, and to do the best I could for them with it."
"I think so too," murmured Katherine; but Mr. Selincourt continued almost as if he had not heard her speak.
"I took the money and banked it with my other savings, feeling rather proud of having such a nest-egg, and making up my mind that when the summer came I would give the girls and the old man such a holiday as they had never even dreamed of before. Then the blow fell. I was called into the room of the chief one morning, and asked if I were a gambler. Of course I said no, and that with a very clear conscience, for I had never been addicted to betting nor card playing in my life. Then I was asked to explain the lump sum of fifty pounds which I had added to my banking account in the previous week."
"But I thought that banking accounts were very private and confidential things," said Katherine.
"So they are supposed to be; but the private affairs of a fellow in my position would be sure to get closely overhauled, and a shrewd bank manager might deem it only his duty to enquire how anyone with my salary and responsibilities could afford to pay in big sums like that," Mr. Selincourt replied. "Of course I could not explain how I had come by the money, and to my amazement I was curtly dismissed, and without a character."
"How horribly cruel!" panted Katherine, whose hands were pressed against her breast, and whose face was deathly white. No one knew how terribly she suffered then, as she stood there bearing, as it were, the punishment for her father's guilty silence, while she listened to the story of what his victim had had to endure.