Bram’s face grew red with sudden perception. But he made no remark.
“I forget exactly what it was, something between two and three hundred pounds. Now, I know that in strict propriety,” went on Mr. Biron, in whom the instinct of confession became suddenly tempered with a desire to prove himself to have acted well in the matter, “I ought to have left the money alone. But it was strongly borne in upon me at the moment that my dear daughter was worried because of unpaid bills; and—and that, in short, it would be just what you would wish me to do if you had been here, for me to borrow the loose sovereigns, and apply them to our pressing necessities. I argued with myself that you would even prefer, in your delicacy, that I should not have to ask for them. And—in short, I may have been wrong, but I—borrowed them.”
A strange light had broken on Bram’s face.
“Did Miss Claire know?” he asked suddenly in a ringing voice.
“Well—er—yes, in point of fact she did. She came to look for me, and she, well, she saw me take them. She—in fact—wished me to put them back; and I could not convince her that I was doing what you would have wished.”
Bram’s brain was bursting. His heart was beating fast. He came quickly towards Mr. Biron, and seized him by the wrist. There was no anger in his eyes, nothing but a fierce, hungry hope. For he could not despise Theodore more than he had done before, while the fact of Claire’s shame on meeting himself might now bear a less awful significance then it had seemed to do.
“She knew you had taken it? And you forced her to say nothing?” cried he in passionate eagerness.
Mr. Biron was disconcerted.
“Well, er—I thought that—that perhaps, until I could see my way to paying it back, it would be better——”
But Bram did not wait for more explanations. Indeed, he needed no more. He saw in a flash what the shame was which he had seen in Claire’s eyes when she met him after his return. It was the knowledge that her father was a thief, that he had robbed Bram himself, and that she could neither make restitution nor confession for him.