"Yes; I'll go to him at once," said Gilbert.

"You will be gentle and careful, Gilbert!" urged his mother. "More than once lately I have been forced to think the troubles through which your father has recently pa.s.sed have been almost too much for him. He is all the time in a state of fever both of body and mind. You will not forget that, my son!"

"Certainly not, mother," replied Gilbert.

Eversleigh had expected Gilbert would come to him, but, up to the moment of seeing him, was uncertain how to act.

Gilbert, when he met his father, began by stating he had received an extraordinary letter from Miss Thornton, in which she broke off her engagement with him, and announced her intention of marrying Bennet.

"As soon as I got the letter," Gilbert continued, "I went over to Surbiton to see her, but when I went there I found she had left the house and gone to a friend in Yorkshire. Mother could tell me nothing, so I have come to you to see if you can help me to some understanding of the matter."

"Did Kitty give you no reason?"

"She merely said she had changed her mind."

"Changed her mind! A woman's reason," said Eversleigh, with a dreary smile.

"Kitty was not that kind of woman," declared Gilbert. "There must have been some powerful reason to make her act in this way."

The young man, his face working, strode up and down the room.

Presently he turned to his father and asked, almost fiercely--

"Can you tell me why this has happened? Do you know why she has broken off with me, and why she is to marry Bennet?"

Eversleigh moved uneasily in his chair, looked at his son with a glance of entreaty, but remained silent.

"Father," said Gilbert, "you do know something! Will you not tell me of it? Have I not a right to know? I appeal to you to tell me everything."

Eversleigh glanced this way and that, like a man seeking some path of escape.

"Father," said Gilbert again; "you must tell me! I love Kitty with my whole soul--she is dearer to me than life, and I cannot resign her without a struggle! I must know what has come between her and me. Can you not help me?"

"Why don't you write Miss Thornton?" asked Eversleigh.

"I shall do so, though the tone of her letter is not encouraging. But do you mean to say you do not know what has made her change her mind?"

Eversleigh tried to speak. A frightful struggle was going on within him.

Should he tell Gilbert the whole truth or not? Suddenly he made up his mind, as Gilbert said beseechingly--

"Oh father, will you not tell me what you know?"

"Yes, I'll tell you what I know--all that I know. But how am I to tell it? You will not forget, Gilbert, that I am your father, your most unhappy father, and you must not condemn me utterly."

Condemn!

The word had an ominous sound, and Gilbert felt himself grow cold as he heard his father's words.

"What is it?" he asked, in a hoa.r.s.e voice.

"Can you cast your thoughts back," said Eversleigh, in a weak and quavering tone, "to a certain Sat.u.r.day in July, when you were in this office? I had spoken to you of the presence of Mr. Bennet at Ivydene----"

"Remember that day!" broke in Gilbert. "Shall I ever forget it? It was on the evening of that day I proposed to Kitty, and she accepted me. I have more cause than ever now to remember it!"

"That was the day, Gilbert. It was also the day, you will remember, on which we heard that Mr. Thornton was coming back to England. The whole trouble begins with his letter," said Eversleigh, and stopped with a gulp and a choke.

"With Mr. Thornton's letter?"

"Yes," said Eversleigh, trying to fight down his emotion. "Gilbert," he went on more calmly, "I am very sorry to tell you that on the day we received the letter intimating Mr. Thornton's return, I received from Mr. Silwood a confession that he had been speculating with the funds and the property of our clients, and that all had been lost--Mr. Thornton's with the rest."

"What!" cried Gilbert, doubting his senses.

"It is true."

"Father, do you know what you are saying?"

"Alas, yes, only too well! Thornton's letter spoke of making a formal examination of the securities we held of his, and it was this which led Silwood to confess his embezzlements."

"But you had nothing to do with them, father!"

"No; but I need not tell you that in the eye of the law, I, as Silwood's partner, was equally guilty. What I have suffered, what I have endured from that moment, you can never guess; I have lived in a h.e.l.l of torture. When I knew the truth, I did not know what to do; but I just let myself drift and drift and drift, hoping against hope that somehow or other there might be a way out of the difficulties that beset me. But there has been no way out. Things have gone from bad to worse. There was first Silwood's death, and then the death of Morris Thornton."

Gilbert uttered a sharp cry.

"You thought Silwood murdered Thornton because of the money?" he said.

"Before the inquest I did, but not afterwards. I know no more about that mystery than you. Well, the effect of these two deaths was to give me a respite--I knew it could be at best but a short one, for at any moment some other client might make a demand which, owing to Silwood's defalcations, we should not be able to meet. And, by a devilish chance of fate, Bennet was the man to make that demand. He told us to sell a block of flats belonging to him, and asked us to advance him ten thousand pounds pending the sale."

"And you couldn't!" exclaimed Gilbert, whose head was whirling with what he had heard.

"There was no possibility of getting the money. But that was not the way in which Bennet came to know of our--embarra.s.sments. He took it into his head to go and see the flats--out of a sort of bravado, I think, and there he discovered the flats had been sold a year ago. He came to me, and I was compelled to tell him the flats had been sold without my knowledge by Silwood. You see that placed me in his power; he could have denounced me at once, and I expected nothing else. But he did not act at once; instead, he said he would take a night to think over it. Next day he returned and announced he would not prosecute me, provided I brought about the breaking off the match between you and Kitty, and got Kitty to marry him."

Eversleigh, who had spoken rapidly, now paused; while Gilbert, with swimming eyes, gazed at his father.

"I protested to Bennet," Eversleigh resumed, "that it was impossible for me to do this; my influence was not strong enough. And then he said he would tell Kitty everything, and leave my fate to her. He did tell her everything, and Kitty, to save me from prison, and you and the rest from ignominy, consented to marry him."

Gilbert drew a deep breath.

"So that is how it is?" he said, his voice full of pain. "She has sacrificed herself for us!"

"It is very n.o.ble of her," said Eversleigh.

"n.o.ble, yes; it is heroic. But we have no right to expect such a sacrifice from her."

"None whatever. Indeed, I told her so. I urged her to leave us to our fate; but she would not."

Eversleigh looked at his son anxiously.

The young man's face had a strange hopeless expression; but he had taken his father's statement much more quietly than the latter had antic.i.p.ated. Gilbert made no frantic moan, the calamity of which he had just been apprised went far beyond anything of the kind. It now literally struck him dumb, both with surprise and grief. Kitty gone from him for ever! Kitty, his darling, his wife that was to be! And she had gone in order to save him and his father; and his father was a defaulter!