'Are there?' murmured Estelle, a little bewildered.
'How should you know—an innocent child like you?' returned Jack, shrinking into himself as if at some terrible recollection.
There was a long pause, while both sat thinking.
'Listen,' went on Estelle, at last. 'I will tell you a story. It is quite true, for I know the man. He is the son of our head gardener. He is a cross old man, and he is often not very nice to us children. But Aunt Betty wanted to make us more patient with him; so she told us what sorrows he had had. They have made him rather grumpy, but his son is very different. The story is all about a great wrong done to that son, and how he forgave it.'
She related the history of Dick Feet almost in the words in which her aunt had told it to the children on the lawn that August afternoon. Jack, listening but carelessly at first, gradually found an interest in it which touched him keenly, but he would not have interrupted the child for worlds. Not a word would he lose. It was so strangely like a story he knew only too well!
'And the grand part was,' wound up the little girl, her earnest eyes on Jack's anxious face, 'the grand part was that he never mentioned the name of the man who did it—not even his father and mother know who it was. He begged them not to mention it if he had by any chance let it out in his illness. But he never had. No one in all the whole world knows but Dick himself.'
'Was his name Dick, too?' muttered Jack to himself.
'Yes,' answered Estelle, who had heard the low murmur, 'his name is Richard Peet.'
'What?' cried Jack, almost starting to his feet in his excitement. 'Is Dick Peet alive?'
(Continued on page [342].)