“No—no—I don’t mean that,” she cried. “Heaven help me, I am almost distracted, I am not myself to-day, and you will listen? It will not cost you anything to listen to me, sir, will it?”
She laid her hand upon my arm entreatingly—she had very earnest brown eyes, and I was not, as I thought, wholly unsusceptible to the influence of brown eyes upon the nervous system. And as she had delicately intimated that listening would not cost me anything, why should I object to listen to her? We were both going the same way. Of course, I should hear a good roundabout story—a second edition of her father’s rigmarole which had prejudiced the magistrate against him—but I was not bound in any way to believe a word that she said.
It sounded uncommonly like truth though, and took me very much aback when she said suddenly—
“Yes, that clock was stolen from you. We knew it was stolen—and who stole it.”
“But you just said——”
“That my father did not steal it. God bless him, no. He did not know—did not dream that we knew—did not know anything about it in any way—does not to this day. It was his property, he thought—all that was left of any value in the world to him; and it had belonged to his son—his eldest son, my half-brother, who——”
“Who was the thief. The infernal——”
“Please don’t, sir. He is dead.”
“Oh! I beg your pardon. I didn’t—know,” I found myself saying in an apologetic manner which really surprised myself.
“Yes, sir, he was the thief,” she said, sinking her voice into a whisper almost. “He committed suicide two months ago abroad, but we have kept the truth back from father. He wasn’t to know—it would have broken his heart, he was so proud of his son, always. But before my half-brother died—he had gone to Canada, to make a home for Kitty and her boy, he said—he wrote to Kitty that he was a repentant man, and that, unknown to any of us, he had been for years in bad hands, working with them, stealing with them. Our poor father thought he was a traveller for a Manchester firm, and so did we, until that terrible confession came across the sea to us. We were not to tell father—we were to make all the restitution that we could presently; he would send full instructions what we were to do by the next mail, he wrote, and the next mail only told us of his death.”