"And that was when you began to suspect?" queried Raymer.
"That was when the suspicion began to torture me. I fought it; oh, you don't know how hard I fought it! There he was, lying sick and helpless; utterly unable to do a thing or say a word in his own defence; and yet, if he were the robber, of course, we should have to give him up. It was terrible!"
"I should say so," was Raymer's sympathetic comment. "How did you get it straightened out, at last?"
"It hasn't been altogether straightened out until just lately--within the past few days," she went on gravely. "After he began to get well, I made him talk to me--about himself, you know. There didn't seem to be anything to conceal. At different times he told me all about his home, and his mother, whom he barely remembers, and the big-hearted, open-handed father who made money so easily in his profession--he was _the_ Griswold, the great architect, you know--that he gave it away to anybody who wanted it--but I suppose he has told you all this?"
Miss Grierson went on smoothly, falling sympathetically into the reminiscent vein.
"Kenneth went to college without ever having known what it was to lack anything in reason that money could buy. A little while after he was graduated his father died."
"Leaving Kenneth poor, I suppose; he has intimated as much to me, once or twice," said Raymer.
"Leaving him awfully poor. He wanted to learn to write, and for a long time he stayed on in New York, living just any old way, and having a dreadfully hard time of it, I imagine, though he would never say much about that part of it. He says he was studying the under-dog, and he has told me some of the most harrowing things he has seen and been through: one of them had a little child in it--a baby that he found in a tenement where the father and mother had both died of starvation ... think of it! And he took the baby away and fed it and kept it...."
Broffin, sitting behind the window draperies, had his elbows on his knees and his head tightly clamped between his hands. He was striving, as the dying strive for breath, to remember. Where had he heard this self-same story of the man who had fought some sort of a studying fight in the back-water of the New York slums? In every detail it came back to him like the recurring scenes of a vivid dream; but the key-notes of time, place, and the man's identity were gone; lost beyond any power of the groping mentality to recall them.