"If you mean that I don't play fast and loose, sir, you are right.
What I do, I do as straight as a needle." The old man sighed carefully.
"You are very like Robert, and yet there is something else. I don't know, I really don't know what!"
"I ought to have more in me than the rest of the family, sir."
This was somewhat startling. Sir William's fingers stroked his beardless cheek uncertainly. "Possibly—possibly."
"I've lived a broader life, I've got wider standards, and there are three races at work in me."
"Quite so, quite so;" and Sir William fumbled among his papers nervously.
"Sir," said Gaston suddenly, "I told you last night the honest story of my life. I want to start fair and square. I want the honest story of my father's life here; how and why he left, and what these letters mean."
He took from his pocket the notes he had found the night before, and handed them. Sir William read them with a disturbed look, and turned them over and over. Gaston told where he had found them.
Sir William spoke at last.
"The main story is simple enough. Robert was extravagant, and Ian was vicious and extravagant also. Both got into trouble. I was younger then, and severe. Robert hid nothing, Ian all he could. One day things came to a climax. In his wild way, Robert—with Jock Lawson—determined to rescue a young man from the officers of justice, and to get him out of the country. There were reasons. He was the son of a gentleman; and, as we discovered afterwards, Robert had been too intimate with the wife—his one sin of the kind, I believe. Ian came to know, and prevented the rescue. Meanwhile, Robert was liable to the law for the attempt. There was a bitter scene here, and I fear that my wife and I said hard things to Robert."