“Never, child, never; for, don’t you see, I must first confess, and that is to put the halter around my own neck.  They would hang me now, sure, for the concealment, if for nothing more.  It might have been better if I had told at first, as you advised.  I believe now they would have been lenient toward me.  A few years in prison, perhaps, and then freedom the rest of my life.  Oh, if I had done it.  But now it is forever too late.  God may forgive me.  I think he will, but I can never join his church with this crime on my soul.”

After this Hannah said no more to him upon the subject, but bent all her energies to soothe and rid him of the morbid, half-crazy fancies which had taken possession of him.

And so the wretched years went on, until Peter Jerrold had numbered more than three score years and ten, and suffered enough to atone many times for crimes far more heinous than his had been.  But nature at last could endure no more, and on the Thanksgiving night, thirty-one years after the event which had blighted his life, he felt that he was dying, and insisted upon confessing his sin not only to his son, but also to his clergyman, who has been his friend and spiritual adviser for so many years.

“I shall die so much easier,” he said to Hannah, who sent for them both, and then with her arm around her father, held him against her bosom, while he told in substance, and with frequent pauses for breath, the story we have narrated.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE EFFECT OF THE STORY.

After the first great shock of surprise, when the word murderer dropped from his lips, and he reproached his sister so harshly and unreasonably, Burton Jerrold stood with folded arms, and a gloomy, unsympathetic face, as immovable at first as if he had been a stone, and listened to the tale as repeated by his father.  But when the tragic part was reached, and he saw the dead man on the floor, his sister crouching in the corner of the room, with Rover at her side, the rude coffin, the open grave, and the secret midnight burial, his breath came in long, shuddering gasps, and the perspiration stood in great drops upon his forehead and about his pallid lips.  And when his father said, “I buried him here in this room, under this bed, where I have slept ever since, and he is there now,” he started backward as suddenly as if the ghost of the peddler had risen from the floor and confronted him.  Then, staggering forward, he would have fallen if Mr. Sanford had not caught him by the arm and supported him a moment.

Bringing him a chair, the clergyman said to him, pityingly: 

“Sit down, Mr. Jerrold, and try to compose yourself.  You are not in fault:  no one can blame you.”

“No, no, I know it; but it hurts me just the same.  The disgrace!  I can never be happy again.  Oh, Hannah, why did you let him tell me?  I cannot bear it, I cannot!” the wretched Burton moaned, and his father replied: