That night I slept.

But there came a night when I did not.  After the penalty had been paid and to most men’s eyes that episode was over, I turned the first page of that volume of slow retribution which is the doom of the man who sins from impulse, and has the recoil of his own nature to face relentlessly to the end of his days.

Scoville was in his grave.

I was alive.

Scoville had shot a man for his money.

I had struck a man down in my wrath.

Scoville’s widow and little child must face a cold and unsympathetic world, with small means and disgrace rising, like a wall, between them and social sympathy, if not between them and the actual means of living.

Oliver’s future faced him untouched.  No shadow lay across his path to hinder his happiness or to mar his chances.

The results were unequal.  I began to see them so, and feel the gnawing of that deathless worm whose ravages lay waste the breast, while hand and brain fulfil their routine of work, as though all were well and the foundations of life unshaken.

I suffered as only cowards suffer.  I held on to honour; I held on to home; I held on to Oliver, but with misery for my companion and a self-contempt which nothing could abate.  Each time I mounted the Bench, I felt a tug at my arm as of a visible, restraining presence.  Each time I returned to my home and met the clear eye of Oliver beaming upon me with its ever growing promise of future comradeship, I experienced a rebellion against my own happiness which opened my eyes to my own nature and its inevitable demand.  I must give up Oliver; or yield my honours, make a full confession and accept whatever consequences it might bring.  I am a proud man, and the latter alternative was beyond me.  With each passing day, the certainty of this became more absolute and more fixed.  In every man’s nature there lurk possibilities of action which he only recognises under stress, also impossibilities which stretch like an iron barrier between him and the excellence he craves.  I had come up against such an impossibility.  I could forego pleasure, travel, social intercourse, and even the companionship of the one being in whom all my hopes centred, but I could not, of my own volition, pass from the judge’s bench to the felon’s cell.  There I struck the immovable,—­the impassable.

I decided in one awful night of renunciation that I would send Oliver out of my life.

The next day I told him abruptly ... hurting him to spare myself ... that I had decided after long and mature thought to yield to his desire for journalism, and that I would start him in his career and maintain him in it for three years if he would subscribe to the following conditions: 

They were the hardest a loving father ever imposed upon a dutiful and loving son.

First:  he was to leave home immediately ... within a few hours, in fact.