When the tea was gone she sat down on the wooden bench beside him, leaning forward on his knee: "Father, you promised once to show me before I went away all that you had belonging to—your other child."
Guinness did not speak at once, but sat smoking his cigar. It went out in his mouth. He made a motion to rise once or twice, and sat down again. "To-night, Kitty?"
"Yes, to-night. We are alone."
He got up at last slowly, going to a drawer in the oak cases which she had never seen opened. Unlocking it, he took out one or two Latin school-books, a broken fishing-rod, a gun and an old cap, and placed them before her. It was a hard task she had set him, she saw. He lifted the cap and pointed to a long red hair which had caught in the button, but did not touch it: "Do you see that? That is Hugh's. I found it there long after he was gone. It had caught there some day when the boy jerked the cap off. He was a careless dog! Always jerking and tearing!"
Catharine was silent until he began putting the things back in the drawer: "Father, there's no chance, is there? You could not be mistaken in that report from Nicaragua? You never thought it possible that your son might yet be alive?"
"Hugh's dead—dead," quietly. But his fingers lingered over the book and gun, as though he had been smoothing the grave-clothes about his boy.
"The proof was complete, then?" ventured Kitty.
He turned on her: "Why do you talk to me of Hugh, Catharine? I can tell you nothing of him. He's dead: isn't that enough? Christian folks would say he was a man for whom his friends ought to think death a safe ending. They have told me so more than once. But he was not altogether bad, to my mind." He bent over the drawer now. Kitty saw that he took hold of the red hair, and drew it slowly through his fingers: his face had grown in these few minutes aged and haggard.
"'Behold, how he loved him!'" she thought. He had been the old man's only son. Other men could make mourning for their dead children, talk of them all their lives; but she knew her mother would not allow Peter to even utter his boy's name.
"I'm sure," she said vehemently from where she stood by the fire, "he was not a bad man. I remember Hugh very well, and I remember nothing that was not lovable and good about him;" the truth of which was that she had a vague recollection of a freckle-faced boy, who had tormented her and her kittens day and night, and who had suddenly disappeared out of her life. But she meant to comfort her father, and she did it.