Miss Grierson went on smoothly, falling sympathetically into the reminiscent vein.
"Kenneth went to college without ever having known what it was to lack anything in reason that money could buy. A little while after he was graduated his father died."
"Leaving Kenneth poor, I suppose; he has intimated as much to me, once or twice," said Raymer.
"Leaving him awfully poor. He wanted to learn to write, and for a long time he stayed on in New York, living just any old way, and having a dreadfully hard time of it, I imagine, though he would never say much about that part of it. He says he was studying the under-dog, and he has told me some of the most harrowing things he has seen and been through: one of them had a little child in it—a baby that he found in a tenement where the father and mother had both died of starvation ... think of it! And he took the baby away and fed it and kept it...."
Broffin, sitting behind the window draperies, had his elbows on his knees and his head tightly clamped between his hands. He was striving, as the dying strive for breath, to remember. Where had he heard this self-same story of the man who had fought some sort of a studying fight in the back-water of the New York slums? In every detail it came back to him like the recurring scenes of a vivid dream; but the key-notes of time, place, and the man's identity were gone; lost beyond any power of the groping mentality to recall them.
"That is why he thinks he is a Socialist," Miss Grierson was going on evenly. "I've been wondering if you knew these things, and I've wanted to tell you. I've thought it might help you to understand him better if you knew something of what he has been through. But we were talking about my dreadful suspicion. It persisted, you know, right along through everything. At last, I felt that I just must know, at whatever cost. One day when we were driving, I brought him here and—and introduced him to Mr. Galbraith. I was so scared that I could taste it—but I did it!"
Raymer laughed. "Of course, nothing came of it?"
"Nothing at all; and the reaction pretty nearly made me faint. They just made talk, like any two freshly introduced people would, and that was all there was of it. You'd say that was proof enough, wouldn't you? Surely Mr. Galbraith would recognize the man who robbed him?"
"Certainly; there couldn't be any doubt of that."
"That's what I said. And then, right out of a clear sky, came another proof that was even more convincing. Do you happen to know who the young woman was who discovered the bank robber on the steamboat?"