Well, the event was certain with such as Robin, and he was presently standing at the door of his room, his boots drawn off and laid aside, listening, with a heart beating in his ears to hinder him, for any sound from beneath.  He did not know whether his father were abed or not.  If not, he must ask his pardon at once.

He went downstairs at last, softly, to the parlour, and peeped in.  All was dark, except for the glimmer from the stove, and his heart felt lightened.  Then, as he was cold with his long vigil outside his bed, he stirred the embers into a blaze and stood warming himself.

How strange and passionless, he thought, looked this room, after the tempest that had raged in it just now.  The two glasses stood there—­his own not quite empty—­and the jug between them.  His father’s chair was drawn to the table, as if he were still sitting in it; his own was flung back as he had pushed it from him in his passion.  There was an old print over the stove at which he looked presently—­it had been his mother’s, and he remembered it as long as his life had been—­it was of Christ carrying His cross.

His shame began to increase on him.  How wickedly he had answered, with every word a wound!  He knew that the most poisonous of them all were false; he had known it even while he spoke them; it was not to curry favour with her Grace that his father had lapsed; it was that his temper was tried beyond bearing by those continual fines and rebuffs; the old man’s patience was gone—­that was all.  And he, his son, had not said one word of comfort or strength; he had thought of himself and his own wrongs, and being reviled he had reviled again....

There stood against the wall between the windows a table and an oaken desk that held the estate-bills and books; and beside the desk were laid clean sheets of paper, an ink-pot, a pounce-box, and three or four feather pens.  It was here that he wrote, being newly from school, at his father’s dictation, or his father sometimes wrote himself, with pain and labour, the few notices or letters that were necessary.  So he went to this and sat down at it; he pondered a little; then he wrote a single line of abject regret.

“I ask your pardon and God’s, sir, for the wicked words I said before I left the parlour.  R.”  He folded this and addressed it with the proper superscription; and left it lying there.

III

It was a strange ride that he had back from Tansley next morning after mass.

Dick Sampson had met him with the horses in the stable-court at Matstead a little after four o’clock in the morning; and together they had ridden through the pitch darkness, each carrying a lantern fastened to his stirrup.  So complete was the darkness, however, and so small and confined the circle of light cast by the tossing light, that, for all they saw, they might have been riding round and round in a garden.  Now trees showed grim and towering for an instant, then gone again; now their eyes were upon the track, the pools, the rugged ground, the soaked meadow-grass; half a dozen times the river glimmered on their right, turbid and forbidding.  Once there shone in the circle of light the eyes of some beast—­pig or stag; seen and vanished again.