“Why, you are grown parson.  Would you go and save him, by giving up the true criminal?  I shall look for it after this, and consider myself no longer in safety.  If you go on in this manner, I shall begin to meditate an off-hand journey to the Mississippi.”

“Ay, and the sooner we all go the better—­though, to be plain, Guy, let this affair once blow over and I care not to go with you any longer.  We must then cut loose for ever.  I am not a good man, I know—­anything but that; but you have carried me on, step by step, until I am what I am afraid to name to myself.  You found me a rogue—­you have made me a—­”

“Why do you hesitate?  Speak it out, Munro; it is a large step gained toward reform when we learn to name truly our offences to ourselves.”

“I dare not.  The thought is sufficiently horrible without the thing.  I hear some devil whispering it too frequently in my ears, to venture upon its utterance myself.  But you—­how you can live without feeling it, after your experience, which has been so much more dreadful than mine, I know not.”

“I do feel it, Munro, but have long since ceased to fear it.  The reiteration takes away the terror which is due rather to the novelty than to the offence.  But when I began, I felt it.  The first sleep I had after the affair of Jessup was full of tortures.  The old man, I thought, lay beside me in my bed; his blood ran under me, and clotted around me, and fastened me there, while his gashed face kept peering into mine, and his eyes danced over me with the fierce light of a threatening comet.  The dream nearly drove me mad, and mad I should have been had I gone to my prayers.  I knew that, and chose a different course for relief.”

“What was that?”

“I sought for another victim as soon after as I conveniently could.  The one spectre superseded the other, until all vanished.  They never trouble me now, though sometimes, in my waking moments, I have met them on the roadside, glaring at me from bush or tree, until I shouted at them fiercely, and then they were gone.  These are my terrors, and they do sometimes unman me.”

“They would do more with me; they would destroy me on the spot.  But, let us have no more of this.  Let us rather see if we can not do something towards making our visions more agreeable.  Do you persevere in the sacrifice of this youngster?  Must he die?”

“Am I a child, Walter Munro, that you ask me such a question?  Must I again tell over the accursed story of my defeat and of his success?  Must I speak of my thousand defeats—­of my overthrown pretensions—­my blasted hopes, where I had set my affections—­upon which every feeling of my heart had been placed?  Must I go over a story so full of pain and humiliation—­must I describe my loss, in again placing before your eyes a portraiture like this?  Look, man, look—­and read my answer in the smile, which, denying me, teaches me, in this case, to arm myself with a denial as immutable as hers.”