There was a spell of dead silence.  The shrunken man, stricken with a sense of his sin of oath-breaking, had Spoken without change of attitude, his hand over his eyes.  Paul, too, sat motionless, and neither Jane nor Barney Bill spoke.  Presently Silas Finn continued: 

“For many years I tried to find my wife and son—­but it was not God’s will.  I have lived with the stain of murder on my soul”—­his voice sank—­“and it has never been washed away.  Perhaps it will be in God’s good time. . . .  And I had condemned my son to a horrible existence—­for I knew my wife was not capable of bringing you up in the way of clean living.  I was right.  Simmons has since told me—­and I was crushed beneath the burden of my sins.”

After a pause he raised a drawn face and went on to tell of his meeting, the year before, with Barney Bill, of whom he had lost track when the prison doors had closed behind him.  It had been in one of his Fish Palaces where Bill was eating.  They recognized each other.  Barney Bill told his tale:  how he had run across Polly Kegworthy after a dozen years’ wandering; how, for love of his old friend, he had taken Paul, child of astonishing promise, away from Bludston—­

“Do you remember, sonny, when I left you alone that night and went to the other side of the brickfield?  It was to think it out,” said Bill.  “To think out my duty as a man.”

Paul nodded.  He was listening, with death in his heart.  The whole fantastic substructure of his life had been suddenly kicked away, and his life was an inchoate ruin.  Gone was the glamour of romance in which since the day of the cornelian heart he had had his essential being.  Up to an hour ago he had never doubted his mysterious birth.  No real mother could have pursued an innocent child with Polly Kegworthy’s implacable hatred.  His passionate repudiation of her had been a cardinal article of his faith.  On the other hand, the prince and princess theory he had long ago consigned to the limbo of childish things; but the romance of his birth, the romance of his high destiny, remained a vital part of his spiritual equipment.  His looks, his talents, his temperament, his instincts, his dreams had been irrefutable confirmations.  His mere honesty, his mere integrity, had been based on this fervent and unshakable creed.  And now it had gone.  No more romance.  No more glamour.  No more Vision Splendid now faded into the light of common and sordid day.  Outwardly listening, his gay, mobile face turned to iron, he lived in a molten intensity of thought, his acute brain swiftly coordinating the ironical scraps of history.  He was the son of Polly Kegworthy.  So far he was unclean; but hitherto her blood had not manifested itself in him.  He was the son of this violent and pathetic fanatic, this ex-convict; he had his eyes, his refined face; perhaps he inherited from him the artistic temperament—­he recalled grimly the daubs on the man’s walls, and his purblind gropings toward artistic self-expression;