Chapter XXXV. Perils by the Way - Page 2

brother."

Granville hesitated for a moment. Should he out with it or not? Then at last the whole long-suppressed truth came out with a burst. He seized his companion's two hands at once in a convulsive grasp.

"That's not surprising either," he said, "after all--for Guy, do you know, we are really brothers!"

Guy gazed at him in astonishment. For a moment he thought his friend's reason was giving way. Then slowly and gradually he took it all in.

"Are really brothers!" he repeated, in a dazed sort of way. "Do you mean it, Kelmscott? Then my father and Cyril's--"

"Was mine too, Waring. Yes; I couldn't bear to die without telling you that. And I tell it now to you. You two are the heirs of the Tilgate estates. And the unknown person who paid six thousand pounds to Cyril, just before you left England, was your father and mine--Colonel Henry Kelmscott."

Guy bent over him for a few seconds in speechless surprise. Words failed him at first. "How do you know all this, Kelmscott?" he said at last faintly.

Granville told him in as few words as possible--for indeed he was desperately weak and ill--by what accident he had discovered his father's secret. But he told him only what he knew himself. For, of course, he was ignorant as yet of the Colonel's seizure and sudden death on the very day after they had sailed from England.

Guy listened to it all in profound silence. It was a strange, and for him a momentous tale. Then he said at last, as Granville finished, "And you never told me this all these long months, Kelmscott."

"I always meant to tell you, Guy," his half-brother answered, in a sudden fit of penitence. "I always meant in the end you and your brother Cyril should come into your own at Tilgate as you ought. I was only waiting--"

"Till you'd realized enough to make good some part of your personal loss," Guy suggested, not unkindly.

"Oh no," Granville answered, flushing up at the suggestion. "I wasn't waiting for that. Don't think me so mercenary. I was waiting for you, in your turn to extend to me your own personal confidence. You know, Guy," he went on, dropping into a still more hushed and solemn undertone, "I saw an evening paper the night we left Plymouth--"

"Oh, I know, I know," Guy cried, interrupting him, with a very pale face. "Don't speak to me of that. I can't bear to think of it. Kelmscott, I was mad when I did that deed. I wasn't myself. I acted under somebody else's compulsion and influence. The man had a sort of hypnotic power over my will, I believe. I couldn't help doing whatever he ordered me. It was he who suggested it. It was he that did it. And it's he who was really and truly guilty."

"And who was that man?" Granville Kelmscott asked with