re of the revelation
which was to come.

"You shall know everything," Father Adrian continued, in the same
hushed tone, so low that Paul had to bend forward to catch the
words as they fell from his lips. "If Martin de Vaux had been of our
religion, and had sought me as a priest of the Church a seal would
have been set upon my mouth. But it was not so! Despite all my
ministrations, he died as he had lived, in heresy and grievous sin.
After all, it is only right that you, his son, should know what he
forebore to tell you. Yet, in my weakness I might have spared you, if
you yourself had not brought down this blow upon your head."

Paul raised his hand, and Father Adrian paused. "Listen," he said,
in a low, deep tone. "There are secret pages in the lives of most of
us--pages blurred and scarred with misery and suffering and sin. But
there is a difference--a great difference. Some are turned over with
firm and penitent fingers, and, although their scarlet record may
never be blotted out, yet, by sacrifice and atonement, the fruits of
the sin itself may die, and, dying, cast no shadow into the future.
A sin against humanity can often be righted by human justice. Towards
the close of my father's days, I knew for the first time that there
was in his life one of those disfigured pages. He told me nothing. I
sought to know nothing. Father Adrian," Paul went on, with a sudden
strain of passion in his tone, and a gesture half unseen in the
darkness, "if the shadow of his sin rests upon any human being, if it
still lives upon the earth, then tell me all that is in your heart
to tell, for there is work to be done. But if that page be locked
and sealed, if those who suffered through it are dead, and the burden
which darkened my father's days is his alone, then spare his memory!
Strike at me, if you will! Deal out your promised vengeance, but let
it fall on me alone!"

Paul ended his speech with a little burst of passion ringing in those
last few words. He was conscious of a deep and fervent desire to hear
nothing, to listen to nothing, which could teach him to hold less dear
his father's memory. He shrank, with a human and perfectly natural
feeling, from hearing evil of the dead. That last evil deed, the
murder in that grim, bare chamber of death, had haunted him with vivid
and painful intensity. But it was a crime by itself. It was horrible
to imagine that it might indeed be the culmination of a life of
license and contempt of al