Philip moved restlessly on his chair, poked the logs to a brighter blaze, and threw on a handful of pine chips from a basket by his side before he answered.  Then he said—­

“No, I have not.”

“Your reluctance is very strange, Philip, I cannot understand it.  I suppose that you are not already married, are you, Philip?”

There was a lurid calm about the old man’s face as he asked this question that was very dreadful in its intensity.  Under the shadow of his thick black eyebrows, gleams of light glinted and flickered in the expanded pupils, as before the outburst of a tempest the forked lightning flickers in the belly of the cloud.  His voice too was constrained and harsh.

Owing to the position of his father’s head, Philip could not see this play of feature, but he heard the voice and thought that it meant mischief.  He had but a second to decide between confession and the lie that leaped to his lips.  An inward conviction told him that his father was not long for this world, was it worth while to face his anger when matters might yet be kept dark till the end?  The tone of the voice—­ ah! how he mistook its meaning—­deceived him.  It was not, he thought, possible that his father could know anything.  Had he possessed a little more knowledge of the world, he might have judged differently.

“Married, no, indeed; what put that idea into your head?” And he laughed outright.

Presently he became aware that his father had risen and was approaching towards him.  Another moment and a hand of iron was laid upon his shoulder, the awful eyes blazed into his face and seemed to pierce him through and through, and a voice that he could not have recognized hissed into his ear—­

“You unutterable liar, you everlasting hound, your wife is at this moment in this house.”

Philip sprang up with an exclamation of rage and cursed Hilda aloud.

“No,” went on his father, standing before him, his tall frame swaying backwards and forwards with excitement; “no, do not curse her, she, like your other poor dupe, is an honest woman; on yourself be the damnation, you living fraud, you outcast from all honour, who have brought shame and reproach upon our honest name, on you be it; may every curse attend you, and may remorse torture you.  Listen:  you lied to me, you lied to your wife, trebly did you lie to the unfortunate girl you have deceived; but, if you will not speak it, for once hear the truth, and remember that you have to deal with one so relentless, that fools, mistaking justice for oppression, call him ‘devil.’  I, ‘Devil Caresfoot,’ tell you that I will disinherit you of every stick, stone, and stiver that the law allows me, and start you in the enjoyment of the rest with my bitterest curse.  This I will do now whilst I am alive; when I am dead, by Heaven, I will haunt you if I can.”

Here he stopped for want of breath, and stood for a moment in the full light of the cheery blaze, one hand raised above his head as though to strike, and, presenting with his glittering eyes and working features, so terrible a spectacle of rage that his son recoiled involuntarily before him.