They parted company at the door of the stables, but Scott had not reached the house when the detective, with a peculiar smile, returned to the room up-stairs, and once more opening the box, drew forth from underneath the satin linings a folded paper, yellow with age and covered with closely written lines; which he read with great interest, after which he remained absorbed in thought until aroused by the entrance of his friend, the coachman.

Several hours later Scott stood alone beside the casket of the murdered man.  The head had been turned slightly to one side and a spray of white blossoms, dropped with seeming carelessness within the casket, concealed all traces of the ghastly wound, their snowy petals scarcely whiter than the marble features of the dead.

It lacked more than an hour of the time set for the funeral.  None of the few invited friends would arrive for some time yet.  The gentlemen of the house were still in the hands of their valets, and the ladies engrossed with the details of their elegant mourning costumes.  Scott, knowing he would be secure from interruption, had chosen this opportunity to take his farewell look at the face of his employer, desiring to be alone with his own thoughts beside the dead.

With strangely commingled emotions he gazed upon the face, so familiar, and yet upon which the death angel had already traced many unfamiliar lines, and as he realized the utter loneliness of the rich man, both in life and in death, a wave of intense pity swept across heart and brain, well-nigh obliterating all sense of personal wrong and injury.

“Unhappy man!” he murmured.  “Unloved in life, unmourned in death!  Not one of those whom you sought to enrich will look upon you to-day with one-half the sorrow or the pity with which I do, whom you have wronged and defrauded from the day of my birth!  But I forgive you the wrong you have done me.  It was slight compared with the far greater wrong you did another, — your brother — your only brother!  A wrong which no sums of money, however vast, could ever repair.  What would I not give if I could once have stood by his side, even as I stand by yours to-day, and looked once upon his face, — the face of your brother and of the father whom, because of your guilt, I have never seen or known, of whom I have not even a memory!  Living, I could never have forgiven you; but here, to-day, in pity for your loveless life and out of the great love I bear that father in his far-away ocean grave, — in his name and in my own, — I forgive you, his brother, even that wrong!”

As Scott left the room, he passed Mr. Whitney in the hall, who, seeing in his face traces of recent emotion, looked after him with great surprise.

“That young man is a mystery!” he soliloquized.  “A mystery!  I confess I cannot understand him.”

A little later the master of Fair Oaks passed for the last time down the winding, oak-lined avenue, followed by the guests of the place and by a small concourse of friends, whose sorrow, though unexpressed by outward signs of mourning, was, in reality, the more sincere.