"Your 'dear father'! Ay! Your 'dear father'!" Once more, nay, twice more, he repeated those words--while all the time the younger man was looking at him intently. "Your 'dear father.'" Then, suddenly, he exclaimed: "Come, let us make a beginning. Are you prepared to hear a strange story?"
"I am prepared to hear anything you may have to tell me."
"So be it. Pay attention. You have but this moment called me your 'dear father.' Well, I am not your father! Though I should have been had all happened as I once--so long ago--so--so long ago--hoped would be the case."
"Not--my--father!" and the younger man stared with a startled look at the other. "Not--my--father. You, who have loved me, fostered me, anticipated every thought, every wish of mine since the first moment I can recollect--not my father! Oh!" and even as he spoke he laid his hand, brown but shapely, on the white, sickly looking one of the other. "Don't say that! Don't say that!"
"I must say it."
"My God! who, then, are you? What are you to me? And--and--who--am--I? It cannot be that we are of strange blood."
And the faltering words of the younger man, the blanched look that had come upon his face beneath his bronze--also the slight tremor of the cigarette between his fingers would have told Mr. Ritherdon, even though he had not already known well enough that such was the case, how deep a shock his words had produced.
"No," he answered slowly, and on his face, too, there was, if possible, a denser, more deadly white than had been there an hour ago--while his lips had become even a deeper leaden hue than before. "No. Heaven at least be praised for that! I am your father's brother, therefore, your uncle."
"Thank Heaven we are so near of kin," and again the hand of the young man pressed that of the elder one. "Now," he continued, though his voice was solemn--hoarse as he spoke, "go on. Tell me all. Blow as this is--yet--tell me all."
"First," replied the other, "first let me show you something. It came to me by accident, otherwise perhaps I should not have summoned you so hurriedly to this meeting; should have restrained my impatience to see you. Yet--yet--in my state of health, it is best to tell you by word of mouth--better than to let you find out when--I--am--dead, through the account I have written and should have left behind me. But, to begin with, read this," and he took from his breast pocket a neatly bound notebook, and, opening it, removed from between the pages a piece of paper--a cutting from a newspaper.