“Bradley Wentworth’s money,” answered Hastings significantly.
“Yet you tell me.”
“Because he has thrown me off. I wrote him ten days since for a beggarly fifty dollars, and he refused to send it to me. In fact he defied me, writing that there was no one alive to feel an interest in the secret I had to sell. That is the sort of man Bradley Wentworth is. Stay, I will show you the letter,” and he began to explore his pockets.
“I can’t find it,” he said, after an ineffectual search, with an expression of perplexity, “and yet I had it when I went to the hotel an hour since.”
“Is this it?” asked Gerald, producing the torn letter already referred to.
“Yes, yes! How came you by it?”
“I found it on the floor of the hotel where you dropped it. You must excuse my reading it. I should not have done so if I had not seen the name of Bradley Wentworth signed to it. Everything that relates to him has an interest for me, and when I read it I felt that it must relate to my father.”
“Yes, it does. I am glad to meet you, boy. I forget your first name.”
“Gerald.”
“I remember now. Why, I was in the church when you were baptized. There’s some difference between now and then.”