uman passion and longing
centered in his frail existence. I managed to earn enough for his eating
and housing, and in time I was almost happy again. This was while our
existence was a struggle; but when, with the discovery of latent powers
in my own mind, I began to find my place in the world and to earn money,
then your sudden interest in my boy taught me a new lesson in human
selfishness; but not, as yet, new fears. My nature was not one to grasp
ideas of evil, and the remembrance of that oath still remained to make
me lenient toward you.

"I let him see you; not much, not often, but yet often enough for him to
realize that he had uncles and cousins, or, if you like it better,
kindred. And how did you repay this confidence on my part? What hand had
ye in the removal of this small barrier to the fortune my own poor
health warranted you in looking upon, even in those early days, as your
own? To others' eyes it may appear, none; to mine, ye are one and all
his murderers, as certainly as all of you were the murderers of the
good physician hastening to his aid. For his illness was not a mortal
one. He would have been saved if the doctor had reached him; but a
precipice swallowed that good Samaritan, and only I, of all who looked
upon the footprints which harrowed up the road at this dangerous point,
knew whose shoes would fit those marks. God's providence, it was called,
and I let it pass for such; but it was a providence which cost me my boy
and made _you_ my heirs."

Silence as sullen in character as the men who found themselves thus
openly impeached had, for some minutes now, replaced the muttered
complaints which had accompanied the first portion of this denunciatory
letter. As the lawyer stopped to cast them another of those strange
looks, a gleam from old Luke's sidewise eyes startled the man next him,
who, shrugging a shoulder, passed the underhanded look on, till it had
circled the board and stopped with the man sitting opposite the crooked
sinner who had started it.

I began to have a wholesome dread of them all and was astonished to see
the lawyer drop his hand from the bottle, which to some degree offered
itself as a possible weapon. But he knew his audience better than I did.
Though the bottle was now free for any man's taking, not a hand trembled
toward it, nor was a single glass held out.

The lawyer, with an evil smile, went on with his relentless client's
story.

"Ye had killed my wife; ye had killed