But Pike was not wandering.  And he told the story of the boy Ripper having been locked up in the mill.  Mr. Ripper was almost a match for Pike himself in deceit; and Pike had only learned the facts by dint of long patience and perseverance and many threats.  The boy had seen the whole accident; had watched it from the window where he was enclosed, unable to get out, unless he had torn away the grating.  Lord Hartledon had lost all command of the little skiff, his arm being utterly disabled; and it came drifting down towards the mill, and struck against the estrade.  The skiff righted itself at once, but not its owner:  there was a slight struggle, a few cries, and he lay motionless, drifting later to the place where he was found.  Mr. Ripper’s opinion was that he had lost his senses with the blow on the temple, and fell an easy prey to death.  Had that gentleman only sacrificed the grating and his own reputation, he might have saved him easily; and that fact had since been upon his conscience, making him fear all sorts of things, not the least of which was that he might be hanged as a murderer.

This story he had told Pike at the time, with one reserve—­he persisted that he had not seen, only heard.  Pike saw that the boy was still not telling the whole truth, and suspected he was screening Lord Hartledon—­he who now stood before him.  Mr. Ripper’s logic tended to the belief that he could not be punished if he stuck to the avowal of having seen nothing.  He had only heard the cries; and when Pike asked if they were cries as if he were being assaulted, the boy evasively answered “happen they were.”  Another little item he suppressed:  that he found the purse at the bottom of the skiff, after he got out of the mill, and appropriated it to himself; and when he had fairly done that, he grew more afraid of having done it than of all the rest.  The money he secreted, using it when he dared, a sixpence at a time; the case, with its papers, he buried in the spot where his master afterwards found it.  With all this upon the young man’s conscience, no wonder he was a little confused and contradictory in his statements to Pike:  no wonder he fancied the ghost of the man he could have saved and did not, might now and then be hovering about him.  Pike learned the real truth at last; and a compunction had come over him, now that he was dying, for having doubted Lord Hartledon.

“My lord, I can only ask you to forgive me.  I ought to have known you better.  But things seemed to corroborate it so:  I’ve heard people say the new lord was as a man who had some great care upon him.  Oh, I was a fool!”

“At any rate it was not that care, Pike; I would have saved my brother’s life with my own, had I been at hand to do it.  As to Ripper—­I shall never bear to look upon him again.”

“He’s gone away,” said Pike.

“Where has he gone?”

“The miller turned him off for idleness, and he’s gone away, nobody knows where, to get work:  I don’t suppose he’ll ever come back again.  This is the real truth of the matter as it occurred, my lord; and there’s no more behind it.  Ripper has now told all he knows, just as fully as if he had been put to torture.”