ret mutinied in the heart that knew its purple war no more? Ah! how
true it was that conscience was a thousand swords. With no witness
against him except himself, whither could he have fled from the
accusation that burned within him as a fire! Not chains nor cells
could have spoken to this strong man like the awful voice of his
solitary heart. How remorse must have corroded that heart! How he must
have numbered the hours of that remorse! How one sanguinary deed must
have trampled away all joyous memories! But the secret agony was over
at last: it was over now.

The moonlight had crept up to the head. It was silvering the gray
hairs that rested there. Ralph stepped up to the bedside and uncovered
the face. Was it changed since he looked on it last? Last night it was
his father's face: was it laden with iniquity now? How the visible
phantom of one horrible moment must have stood up again and again
before these eyes! How sternly fortune must have frowned on these
features! Yet it was his father's face still.

And what of that father's great account? Who could say what the final
arbitrament would be? Had he who lay there, the father, taken up all
this load of guilt and remorse for love of him, the son? Was he gone
to a dreadful audit, too, and all for love of him? And to know nothing
of it until now--until it was too late to take him by the hand or to
look into his eyes! Nay, to have tortured him unwittingly with a
hundred cruel words! Ralph remembered how in days past he had spoken
bitterly in his father's presence of the man who allowed Simeon Stagg
to rest under an imputation of murder not his own. That murder had
been done to save his own life--however unwisely, however rashly,
still to save his (Ralph's) own life.

Ralph dropped to his knees at the bedside. What barrier had stood
between the dead man and himself that in life the one had never
revealed himself to the other? They were beyond that revealment now,
yet here was everything as in a glass. "Oh, my father," cried Ralph as
his head fell between his hands, "would that tears of mine could scald
away your offence!"

Then there came back the whisper of the old words, "The lofty looks of
men shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down."

Ralph knelt long at his father's side, and when he rose from his knees
it was with a calmer but a heavier heart.

"Surely God's hand is upon me," he murmured. The mystery would yield
no other meaning. "Gon