"You never saw me but the one time," said Forrest. "That was many years ago, and you would not remember. You were a--little wild that night. You sat against me at a game of faro. But even if you had been yourself--I have changed very much. I was at that time, as you were, little more than a boy." "Good Lord!" said Ballin, "were you a part of that hectic flush that to myself I only refer to as 'Sacramento'?" "You do not look as if it had turned you into a drinking man," said Forrest. "It didn't," said Ballin, and without seeing any reason for confiding in the stranger he proceeded to do so. "It was nip and tuck for a time," he said, "and then money came to me, and this old place and responsibilities, and I became, more from force of circumstances than from any inner impulse, a decentish citizen." "The money made everything smooth, did it?" said Forrest. "I wonder." "You wonder--what?" said Ballin. "If it could--money alone. I have had it at times--not as you have had it--but in large, ready sums. Yet I think it made very little difference." "What have you been doing since--Sacramento?" asked Ballin. "Up to a month ago," said Forrest, "I kept on dealing--in different parts of the world--in San Francisco, in London--Cairo--Calcutta. And then the matter which brings me here was brought to my attention." "Yes?" said Ballin, a little more coolly. "When you were in Sacramento," Forrest went on quietly and evenly as if stating an acknowledged fact, "you did not expect to come into all this. Then your cousin, Ranger Ballin, and his son went down in the City of Pittsburgh; and all this"--he made a sudden, sweeping gesture with one of his long, well-kept hands--"came to you." "Yes?" Ballin's voice still interrogated coolly. Forrest broke into that naive, boyish smile of his. "My dear sir," said he, "I saw a play last winter in which the question is asked, 'Do you believe in Fairies?' I ask you, 'Do you believe in Gypsies?'" "In what way?" Ballin asked, and he, too, smiled. "Ranger Ballin," said Forrest, "had another son who was spirited away in childhood by the gypsies. That will explain this visit, which on the face of it is an impertinence. It will explain why I have entered this house without knocking, and have invited myself to luncheon. You see, sir, all this"--and again he made the sudden, sweeping gesture--"is mine." It speaks for Forrest's effect that, although reason told Ballin to doubt this cataclysmic statement, instinct convinced him that it was true. Yet what its truth might mean to him did not so convincingly appear. That he might be ousted from all that he looked on as his own did not yet occur to him, even vaguely. "Then we are cousins," he said simply, and held out his hand. But Forrest did not take it at once. "Do you understand what cousinship with me means to you?" he said. "Why," said Ballin, "if you _are_ my cousin"--he tried to imply the doubt that he by no means felt--"there is surely enough for us both."