“If I find you’re jokin’ with me, young man, I’ll—I’ll——”
Tears dropped from her eyes. She dashed them off with her hand in order the better to glare at him.
“Didn’t Walter tell you who I am?” he asked soothingly.
“But you’re not that man.” She stamped her foot. “He died years ago—in a yacht—I read about it.”
“That was my father; we had the same name.”
With a word here and there he managed to calm her agitation. Slowly she became convinced that this easy-going young man was a financial aristocrat, a wizard come in time to save her friends.
He had been a sickly boy, he told her; so the family had let him grow up a recluse. It was not until he had arrived at college years that he began to develop physically, but by that time, although he had grown into a stalwart frame of a man, he was hopelessly bookish and “queer.” The father was one of the dominant big men of his time, but he was kind and sympathetic with the boy, so “Richard” had gone his own way and was allowed peacefully to ply his individualism.
“After college,” he told her, “I decided that I could not live the dependent life any longer. I talked it over with father and he told me to try things out for myself. He offered me money, but that did not seem like playing fair; so I told him that I’d feel much happier if I went it ‘on my own,’ as the English say. He said it wouldn’t be a bad idea to knock about a bit and discover what I was best fitted to do. And so I drifted here and there, sometimes having things easy and sometimes not so easy, but you can’t imagine how contented I was. I have an enormous curiosity about life—I’m perfectly greedy to know why things are the way they are.... Then I fell in with Jawn’s group over on the West Side and met the ‘Widow’ Knowles, who gives me enough tutoring to do to keep me in food and raiment, and I lived—well, like the lilies of the field.”
“But is it true that your father was——” But she found she could not say it; it seemed too heartless to ask him.
“Quite true,” he answered her unfinished question.