“I am very glad to hear it,” he said. “If Joe ever received a letter from Dick—which I doubt—and failed to answer it, he showed more sense than I ever gave him credit for having. Silence was the best possible answer. There is no use in raking up an old disgrace and trying to smooth it over at this late day; that’s a piece of wisdom you would do well to take to heart yourself; silence is golden in such affairs.”
As the sentences came back to her through the years with startling clearness, they came fraught with new significance in the light of Mr. Forman’s words just now spoken; could it be possible that—she must know.
“Joseph,” she broke the silence abruptly, “didn’t you once, a long time ago, have a letter from your brother Derrick about the—his trouble?”
“Not a line,” came huskily from behind the shielding hand. “Never a single word or sign from him since the night he disappeared. I believed that I should; I watched for it through years; I told myself that if Dick were in the land of the living he would surely write to me, some time. I kept hoping for it against all odds, until—” His voice dropped again. His sister struggled with her dismay and indignation, and spoke earnestly:
“Joseph, he did write you two letters at different times, long ones, and told you everything.”
Mr. Forman sat erect again. “Where are they?” he demanded.
“That I do not know; I wish I did. Oh, I should be glad to feel certain that they were lost in the mails!”
If he followed her thought, he made no sign, but thrust at her another question:
“How do you know this to be so?”
“He told me, himself. No, I don’t mean that I saw him,” she added, quickly, in response to the look on the questioner’s face. “He wrote to me. He wrote very often; after everything was made plain by that young man’s confession, we corresponded for years. The reason he did not write to you during that time was because he thought you did not credit the story of the stolen money, and did not want to have anything to do with him. I shall have to confess, Joseph, that I thought the same. I am afraid I have thought of you all these years as a hard man. If I had imagined for a moment how it was, of course you would have been told long ago all that I knew; and I should have begged you to write to him.”