The singer stopped, as though conscious of the presence of a listener, and looking up from where he sat on a round block of timber, cutting up a similar block into firewood, he saw Ralph Ray leaning on his staff near the cave’s mouth.  He had already heard of the sorrow that had fallen on the household at Shoulthwaite.  With an unspeakable look of sympathy in his wild, timid eyes, as though some impulse of affection urged him to throw his arms about Ralph and embrace him, while some sense of shame impelled him to kneel at his feet, Sim approached him, and appeared to make an effort to speak.  But he could say nothing.  Ralph understood his silence and was grateful for it.  They went into the cave, and sat down in the dusk.

“You can tell me all about it, now,” Ralph said, without preamble of any sort, for each knew well what lay closest at the other’s heart.  “He is gone now, and we are here together, with none but ourselves to hear.”

“I knew you must know it one day,” Sim said, “but I tried hard to hide it from you—­I did, believe me, I tried hard—­I tried, but it was not to be.”

“It is best so,” Ralph answered; “you must not bear the burden of guilt that is not your own.”

“I’m no better than guilty myself,” said Sim.  “I don’t reckon myself innocent; not I. No, I don’t reckon myself innocent.”

“I think I understand you, Sim; but you were not guilty of the deed?”

“No, but I might have been—­I might but for an accident—­the accident of a moment; but I’ve thought sometimes that the crime is not in the deed, but the intention.  No, Ralph, I am the guilty man, after all:  your father had never thought of the crime, not he, but I had brooded over it.”

“Did you go out that night intending to do it?” Ralph said.

“Yes; at least I think I did, but I don’t feel sure; my mind was in a broil; I hardly knew what I meant to do.  If Wilson had told me as I met him in the road—­as I intended to meet him—­that he had come back to do what he had threatened to do so often—­then—­yes, then, I must have done it—­I must.”

“What had he threatened?” Ralph asked, but there was no note of inquiry in his voice.  “Whom did it concern?”

“It concerned yourself, Ralph,” said Sim, turning his head aside.  “But no matter about that,” he added.  “It’s over now, it is.”

Ralph drew out of his pocket the paper that had fallen from his father’s breast.

“Is this what you mean?” he said, handing it to Sim.

Sim carried it to the light to read it.  Returning to where Ralph sat, he cried in a shrill voice,—­

“Then he had come back to do it.  O God, why should it be murder to kill a scoundrel?”

“Did you know nothing of this until now?”

“Nothing.  Wilson threatened it, as I say; he told me he’d hang you on the nearest gibbet, he did—­you who’d saved his life—­leastways, so they say—­the barren-hearted monster!”