“He did not finish, although I was thirsting for the words; they both seemed arrested suddenly, then started on, and I watched whither they went.

“There was now no light, save that of the stars.  I could scarcely keep them in sight.  I went nearer,—­hid myself behind one of the posts on the pier.  They had gone upon one of the boats,—­that which lay farthest down the stream.  It was Bernard that they watched.  I found him with my eyes before they reached where he stood.  A boy came singing from his daily work; he passed close beside me, and, as he went, he beat upon the post with a boat’s oar.  I waited until I could come from my hiding-place without his seeing; then I went after him.  I sent him for ’the gentleman that had gone down there,’ telling him to say that ’a lady wished to see him.’

“Bernard came.  I told him that I had been searching for him on the sands,—­that I wanted to talk to him; and he and I walked on again, village-ward, as we had done on the last night.  It was very hard to begin, to open the cruel theme,—­to say to this person, who walked with folded arms, and eyes that I knew had no external sight, what I thought; but I must.  When I had said all that I would have said to any other human soul, under like darkness, he lighted up the night of his sin with strange fires.  He poured upon his family’s past the light hereditary.  Abraham had been true in his statements.  Bernard McKey was not well-born.  He told me this:  that his father had been a destroyer of life; that God had been his Judge, and had now set the seal of the father’s sin into the son’s heart.  Oh, it was fearful, this tide of agony with which that soul was overwhelmed!  He pictured his deed.  Abraham had found out the crime of his father, had cruelly sent it home on his own head, had said that a murderer’s son could never find rest in the family of Axtell, had sent him forth, with hatred in his heart, to work out in shadow the very deed his father had wrought in substance, to destroy Mary Percival, the child of his best friend, and to strike from off the earth Abraham’s arch of light.  It was wonderful:  a chance, a change, had killed Mary.

“Doctor Percival had that very afternoon, while we were gone, wrought changes in the little white office; hence the fatal mistake.  Bernard had gone in, taken up a bottle from the very place where the article wanted had stood for two years, poured its contents into the cup, carried it in, and no hand stayed him.  He was too blinded by suffering to see for himself.  Doctor Percival’s hand gave the draught, and Mary was dead.  What should be done?

“‘What shall I do?  What would you have me to do?’ asked Bernard.