“Vi, darling,” he said, “you must try to forgive my father, if it was he who made or caused to be made that erasure which might so easily have passed unnoticed, as indeed it did, for when the Consul prepared my copy with the original he saw nothing of it; word by word he went over the two together. You must forgive him, though it was a wicked and a terrible fraud that my father—I suppose—practised, for unless he had other children, he was robbing you of all that was rightfully yours.
“I think the reconstruction of it is easy enough. My mother died, and he was determined that his son, one of them, should succeed. I imagine he made, or procured the making, of that erasure after my mother’s death. He had meant to marry her, indeed he did marry her, and I think he must have desired to repair the wrong, the bitter wrong, he did her in the person of her children. I’ve got something to forgive him, too, and willingly I do that. We must both forgive him, Vi. I the bastard, and you the heiress of Stanier.”
Violet would have forgiven Satan himself for all the evil wrought on the face of the earth from the day when first he set foot in Paradise.
“Oh, Colin, yes,” she said. “Freely, freely!”
“That’s sweet of you. That is a great weight off my mind. And you’ll make your forgiveness effective, Vi?”
She did not grasp this.
“In what way?” she asked.
“I mean that you won’t want to make an exposure of this now,” said he. “I should like my father never to know that I have found out what he did. I should like him to die thinking that Raymond will succeed him, and that his fraud is undiscovered. Of course, you would be within your rights if you insisted on being established as the heiress to Stanier now. There are certain revenues, certain properties always made over to the heir on coming of age, and Raymond and I come of age in a few months. Can you let Raymond enjoy them for my father’s sake? He has always been amazingly good to me.”
“Oh, Colin, what a question!” she said. “What do you take me for? Would that be forgiveness?”
“That’s settled then; bless you for that. The only objection is that Raymond scores for the present, but that can’t be helped. And there’s just one thing more. About—about what has happened between us. Shall I tell my father to-morrow? Then we can settle how Raymond is to be told.”