The moonlight had crept up to the head.  It was silvering the gray hairs that rested there.  Ralph stepped up to the bedside and uncovered the face.  Was it changed since he looked on it last?  Last night it was his father’s face:  was it laden with iniquity now?  How the visible phantom of one horrible moment must have stood up again and again before these eyes!  How sternly fortune must have frowned on these features!  Yet it was his father’s face still.

And what of that father’s great account?  Who could say what the final arbitrament would be?  Had he who lay there, the father, taken up all this load of guilt and remorse for love of him, the son?  Was he gone to a dreadful audit, too, and all for love of him?  And to know nothing of it until now—­until it was too late to take him by the hand or to look into his eyes!  Nay, to have tortured him unwittingly with a hundred cruel words!  Ralph remembered how in days past he had spoken bitterly in his father’s presence of the man who allowed Simeon Stagg to rest under an imputation of murder not his own.  That murder had been done to save his own life—­however unwisely, however rashly, still to save his (Ralph’s) own life.

Ralph dropped to his knees at the bedside.  What barrier had stood between the dead man and himself that in life the one had never revealed himself to the other?  They were beyond that revealment now, yet here was everything as in a glass.  “Oh, my father,” cried Ralph as his head fell between his hands, “would that tears of mine could scald away your offence!”

Then there came back the whisper of the old words, “The lofty looks of men shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down.”

Ralph knelt long at his father’s side, and when he rose from his knees it was with a calmer but a heavier heart.

“Surely God’s hand is upon me,” he murmured.  The mystery would yield no other meaning.  “Gone to his account with the burden, not of my guilt, but of my fate, upon him.”

Ralph walked to the fire and turned over the expiring peat.  It gave a fitful flicker.  He took from his pocket the paper that had fallen from his father’s breast, and looked long at it in the feeble light.  It was all but the only evidence of the crime, and it must be destroyed.  He put the paper to the light.  Drawing it away, he paused and reflected.  He thought of his stricken mother, and his resolve seemed fixed.  He must burn this witness against his father; he must crush the black shadow of it in his hand.  Could he but crush as easily the black shadow of impending doom!  Could he but obliterate as completely the dread reckoning of another world!

The paper that hung in his hand had touched the flickering peat.  It was already ignited, but he drew it once more away, and crushed the burning corner to ashes in his palm.

No, it must not be destroyed.  He thought of how Rotha had stood over her father’s prostrate form in the room of the village inn, and cried in her agony, “Tell them it is not true.”  Who could say what this paper might yet do for him and her?