Alice could not recall, even afterward, that Kimberly appeared under a strain; but she noticed as she listened that he spoke with a care not quite natural.
"You may imagine the scene," he continued. "But the worst was to come----"
"Oh, you were there?"
"When you hear the rest you will think, if there is a God, I should have been, for I might have saved him. I was in Honolulu. I did not even hear of it for ten days. They found him in his bathroom where he had dressed, thrown himself on a couch, and shot himself."
"How terrible!"
"In his bedroom they found a letter. It had been sent to him within the hour by a party of blackmailers, pressing a charge--of which he was quite innocent--on the part of a designing woman, and threatening that unless he complied with some impossible demands, his exposure and news of an action for damages should follow in the papers containing the account of his sister's wedding. They found with this his own letter to his mother. He assured her the charge was utterly false, but being a Kimberly he knew he should not be believed because of the reputation of his uncles, one of whom he named, and after whom he himself was named, and to whom he had always been closest. This, he feared, would condemn him no matter how innocent he might be; he felt he should be unable to lift from his name a disgrace that would always be recalled with his sister's wedding; and that if he gave up his life he knew the charges would be dropped because he was absolutely innocent. And so he died."
For a moment Alice stood in silence. "Poor, poor boy!" she said softly. "How I pity him!"
"Do you so? Then well may I. For I am the uncle whom he named in his letter."
Unable or unwilling to speak she pointed to the tablet as if to say: "You said the uncle he was named after."
He understood. "Yes," he answered slowly, "my name is Robert Ten Broeck Kimberly."