Billy waited apprehensively for what might follow. It was possible that his father had already robbed the Tyringham estate; the thought chilled him into dejection. "I _had_ stolen it. My God, I couldn't help it!" Deering groaned. "I left that waste paper in the box to fool myself, and put the real stuff in another place. I hoped--yes, that was it, I hoped--I'd never find Tyringham and I could keep those bonds. But all the time I kept looking for him. You see, Billy, I couldn't be as bad as I wanted to be; and yet----" He drew his hand across his face as though to shut out the picture he saw of himself as a felon. "Oh, you wouldn't have done it; you couldn't have done it!" cried Billy, anxious to mitigate his father's misery. "If you hadn't hidden the real bonds, I'd have been a thief! Ned Ranscomb was trying to corner Mizpah and needed my help. I put in all I had--that two hundred thousand you gave me my last birthday, and then he skipped. When I get hold of _him_----!" "You put two hundred thousand in Mizpah?" "I did, like a fool, and, of course, it's lost! Ned went daffy about a girl and dropped Mizpah--and my money!" Mr. Deering was once more a business man. "What did Ranscomb buy at?" he asked curtly. "Seven and a quarter." "Then you needn't kick Ned! The Ranscombs put through their deal and Mizpah's gone to forty!" Hood rejoined them, and they talked till daylight. He told them much of himself. The responsibility of a great fortune had not appealed to him; he had been honest in his preference for the vagabond life, but realized, now that he was well launched upon middle age, that it was only becoming and decent for him to alter his ways. Billy's liking for him, that had struggled so rebelliously against impatience and distrust, warmed to the heartiest admiration. "Of course I knew you were married," the senior Deering remarked for Billy's enlightenment, "and now and then I got glimpses of you in your gypsy life. Your wife had a fortune of her own--she was one of Augustus Davis's daughters--so of course she hasn't suffered from your foolishness." "My wife shared my tastes; there has never been the slightest trouble between us. Our daughter is just like us. But now Mrs. Tyringham thinks we ought to settle down and be respectable." "I knew your wife and daughter had come home. I had got that far," Mr. Deering resumed. "And after I began to suspect that you and Hood were the same person I put my own daughter into your house on the Dempster road as a spy to watch for you." "My wife wasn't fooled for a minute," Hood chuckled. "We were having our last fling before we settled down for the rest of our days. We all have the same weakness for a springtime lark: my wife, my daughter, and I." Billy ran his hands through his hair. "Pierrette! Pierrette is your daughter!"