"I fancy there is no manner of doubt that it is the same," 'Duke Radford said slowly. "The day we went to Fort Garry, M'Crawney told me he had a letter from Mr. Selincourt too, in which the new owner said he was a Bristol man, and that he had known what it was to be poor, so did not mean to risk money on ventures he had no chance of controlling, and that was why he was coming here next summer to boss the fleet."
"Poor Father!" Katherine murmured softly. "Ah, you may well say poor!" he answered bitterly. "If it were not for you, the boys, poor Nellie, and her babies, I'd just be thankful to know that I'd never get up from this bed again, for I don't feel that I have courage to face life now."
"Father, you must not talk nor think like that, indeed you must not!" she exclaimed, in an imploring tone. "Think how we need you and how we love you. Think, too, how desolate we should be without you."
"That is what I tell myself every hour in the twenty-four, and I shall make as brave a fight for it as I can for your sakes," he said in a regretful tone, as if his family cares were holding him to life against his will. Then he went on: "Oswald Selincourt and I were in the same business house in Bristol years ago, and I did him a great wrong."
Katherine had a sensation that was almost akin to what she would have felt if someone had dashed a bucket of ice-cold water in her face. But she did not move nor cry out, did not even gasp, only sat still with the dumb horror of it all filling her heart, until she felt as if she would never feel happy again. Her father had always seemed to her the noblest of men, and she had revered him so, because he always stood for what was right and true. Then some instinct told her that he must be suffering horribly too, and because she could not speak she slid her warm fingers into his trembling hand and held it fast.
"Thank you, dear, I felt I could trust 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."