If the ground of his talk appeared somewhat
delicate, nothing could have been more matter-of-fact than the way he
tramped it. Yet now he palpably paused to ask himself whether it was
worth his while to go more into detail. Yes; clearly it was. If it ever
became necessary to ask the boarding-house agent to find his father for
him, she would have to know what the situation was, and now was the time
to make it plain to her once and for all.
"He is the man I lived with till I was fourteen; one of my friends, a
policeman. For a long time I supposed, of course, that Tim was my
father, but when I was ten or twelve, he told me, first that I was an
orphan who had been left with him to bring up, and later on, that I had
a father somewhere who was not in a position to bring up children. That
was all he would ever say about it. I became a student while still a
little boy, having educated myself practically without instruction of
any sort, and when I was fourteen I left Tim because he married at that
time, and, with the quarreling and drinking that followed, the house
became unbearable.
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