“I’d been drinking hard—­you know that.  I was drunk yon night, and I hadn’t a penny in my pouch.  On my way home from the inn I lay down in the dike and fell asleep.  I was awakened by the voices of two men quarrelling.  You know who they were.  Old Wilson was waving a paper over his head and laughing and sneering.  Then the other snatched it away.  At that Wilson swore a dreadful oath, and flung himself on—­the other.  It was all over in a moment.  He’d given the little waistrel the cross-buttock, and felled him on his head.  I saw the other ride off, and I saw Simeon Stagg.  When all was still, I crept out and took Wilson’s money—­yes, I took it; but I flung it into the next beck.  For the moment, when I touched him I thought he was alive.  I’ve not been drinking hard since then, Ralph; no, nor never will again.”

“Ey, you’ll do better than that, Robbie.”

Ralph said no more.  There was a long silence between the two men, until Robbie, unable to support it any longer, broke in again with, “I took it, but I flung it into the next beck.”

The poor fellow seemed determined to dwell upon the latter fact as in some measure an extenuation of his offence.  In his silent hours of remorse he had cherished it as one atoning circumstance.  It had been the first fruits of a sudden resolution of reform.  Sobered by the sense of what part he had played in crime, the money that had lain in his hand was a witness against him; and when he had flung it away he had only the haunting memory left of what he would have done in effect, but had, in fact, done only in name.

“Why did you not say this at the inquest?” asked Ralph.  “You might have cleared Simeon Stagg.  Was it because you must have accused my father?”

“I can’t say it was that.  I felt guilty myself.  I felt as if half the crime had been mine.”

There was another pause.

“Robbie,” Ralph said at length, “would you, if I wished it, say no more about all this?”

“I’ve said nothing till now, and I need say nothing more.”

“Sim will be as silent—­if I ask him.  There is my poor mother, my lad; she can’t live long, and why should she be stricken down?  Her dear old head is bowed low enough already.”

“I promise you, Ralph,” said Robbie.  He had turned half aside, and was speaking falteringly.  He remembered one whose head had been bowed lower still—­one whose heart had been sick for his own misdeeds, and now the grass was over her.

“Then that is agreed.”

“Ralph, there’s something I should have said before, but I was afeared to say it.  Who would have believed the word of a drunkard?  That’s what I was, God forgive me!  Besides, it would have done no good to say it, that I can see, and most likely some harm.”

“What was it?”

“Didn’t they say they found Wilson lying fifty yards below the river?”

“They did; fifty yards to the south of the bridge.”