“A name is nothing unless you make it something—but we won’t argue about that. You say you want me to go back to New Hampshire and set things right. It hasn’t occurred to you that there might be a certain difficulty in the way?”
“You mean the fact that you didn’t stay and fight it out at the time?”
The ghost of a smile came again.
“No; I didn’t mean that. I mean the fact that not all of your money could help me to prove what isn’t so. I took the money from the bank; stole it, you’ll say, though I chose to call it squaring accounts with Hiram Witherspoon, who had kept me on starvation wages for years. I took it and got away with it.”
Once again Philip’s heart skipped a beat and stopped, and for a moment the room whirled in dizzying circles for him.
“You—you stole it?” he faltered, in a voice that he scarcely recognized as his own. Then, helplessly: “I—I don’t understand.”
“You wouldn’t,” was the curt reply, “you are too much of a Sanborn. They never kick over the traces.” A pause, and then: “You’d never understand in a month of Sundays, Phil. Your grandfather was a hard man and a hypocrite. He never took his hand off my collar until after I was a man grown—bull-necked me into everything I ever did, even to my marriage with your mother, forgetting that I had the same blood in me that he had in him. He lived a double life until he died, and thought nobody knew; but I knew, and I did the same until the time came when I could help myself and bolt—with the other woman.”
“Oh, my God!” Philip groaned, and covered his face with his hands to shut out the sight of the man who sat opposite, calmly indifferent, as it seemed, to the havoc he had wrought.
When Philip looked up it was to say harshly: “Where is the other woman now?”
“She is here—in Denver. She does a turn now and then at the Corinthian when the cards run queer for me.”