THE UNSPEAKABLE GENTLEMAN
seemed to me that pain had made his face look older, and not even the smile on his lips concealed little lines of suffering.
"And what are we to forget?" he asked.
"Surely you know," I said.
"No," said my father, "I do not. Out with it—what are we to forget?"
Was he still acting? Was it ever possible to understand him? Perhaps even now he was turning the situation into a jest, and smiling to himself as he watched me. And yet somehow I had ceased to hate him.
"Do you mean," I asked "that you never took it?"
Slowly my father's body straightened in his chair, and his lips, drawn tight together, seemed to repress an exclamation.
"So he told you that," he said. "He told you that I made off with her fortune? Gad! but he was clever, very, very clever."
He paused, and refilled his glass, and held it steadily before him. His voice, when he spoke, was gentle, and, like his face, strung taut with pain.
"No wonder she never sent me word," he murmured.
"Do you mean," I asked, "that you never took it?"
[227]
