‘I will turn into bed,’ I said, ’and sleep over it.  The idea is a figment of an over-wrought brain.  Destiny would never play any man a trick like that which I have dared to dream of.  Among human calamities it would be at once the most shocking and the most whimsical—­this imaginary woe that scares me.  Destiny is merciless, but who ever heard of Destiny playing mere cruel practical jokes upon man?  Up to now the Fates have never set up as humorists.  Now, for a man to love, to dote upon, a girl whose father is the violator of his own father’s tomb—­a wretch who has called down upon himself the most terrible curse of a dead man that has ever been uttered—­that would be a fate too fantastically cruel to be permitted by Heaven—­by any governing power whose sanctions were not those of a whimsical cruelty.’

Yet those words of my mother’s about Wynne, and her suspicions of him, were flitting about the air of the room like fiery-eyed bats.

The air of the room—­ah! it was stifling me.  I opened the window and leant out.  But that made matters a thousand times worse, for the moon was now at the very full, and staring across—­staring at what?—­staring across the sea at the tall tower of the old church on the cliff, where perhaps the sin—­the ‘unpardonable sin,’ according to Cymric ideas—­of sacrilege—­sacrilege committed by her father upon the grave of mine—­might at this moment be going on.  The body of the church was hidden from me by the intervening trees, and nothing but the tall tower shone in the silver light.  So intently did the moon stare at it, that it seemed to me that the inside of the church, with its silent aisles, arches, and tombs, was reflected on her disc.  The moon oppressed me, and when I turned my eyes away I seemed to see hanging in the air the silent aisles of a church, through whose windows the moonlight was pouring, flooding them with a radiance more ghastly than darkness, concentrating all its light on the chancel, beneath which I knew that my father was lying in the dark crypt with a cross on his breast.  I turned for relief to look in the room, and there, in the darkness made by the shadow of the bed, I seemed to read, written in pale, trembling flame, the words: 

  ’LET THERE BE NO MAN TO PITY HIM, NOR TO HAVE COMPASSION UPON HIS
  FATHERLESS CHILDREN....LET HIS CHILDREN BE VAGABONDS, AND BEG THEIR
  BREAD:  LET THEM SEEK IT ALSO OUT OF DESOLATE PLACES.’

I returned to the window for relief from the bedroom.

’Now, let me calmly consider the case in all its bearings, I said to myself, drawing a chair to the window and sitting down with my elbows resting on the sill.  ’Suppose Wynne really did overhear the altercation between my mother and my uncle, which seems scarcely probable, has drink really so demoralised him, so brutalised him, that for drink he would commit the crime of sacrilege?  There are no signs of his having sunk so low as that.  But suppose the crime were committed, what then?  Do I really believe that the curse of my father and of the Psalmist would fall upon Winifred’s pure and innocent head?  Certainly not.  I do not believe in the effect of curses at all.  I do not belief in any supernatural interference with the natural laws of the universe.’