The reply brought the blood back into his fading cheek.

“Father, I have already explained all this to Mr. Andrews, and now I will explain it to you.  I never liked Mr. Etheridge as well as you did, and I brooded incessantly in those days over the influence which he seemed to exert over you in regard to my future career.  But I never dreamed of doing him a harm, and never supposed that I could so much as attempt any argument with him on my own behalf till that very night of infernal complications and coincidences.  The cause of this change was as follows:  I had gone up stairs, you remember, leaving you alone with him as I knew you desired.  How I came to be in the room above I don’t remember, but I was there and leaning out of the window directly over the porch when you and Mr. Etheridge came out and stood in some final debate on the steps below.  He was talking and you were listening, and never shall I forget the effect his words and tones had upon me.  I had supposed him devoted to you, and here he was addressing you tartly and in an ungracious manner which bespoke a man very different from the one I had been taught to look upon as superior.  The awe of years yielded before this display, and finding him just human like the rest of us, the courage which I had always lacked in approaching him took instant possession of me, and I determined with a boy’s unreasoning impulse to subject him to a personal appeal not to add his influence to the distaste you at present felt for the career upon which I had set my heart.  Nothing could have been more foolish and nothing more natural, perhaps, than the act which followed.  I ran down into the ravine with the wild intention, so strangely duplicated in yourself a few minutes later, of meeting and pleading my cause with him at the bridge, but unlike you, I took the middle of the ravine for my road and not the secluded path at the side.  It was this which determined our fate, father, for here I ran up against the chestnut tree, saw the stick and, catching it up without further thought than of the facility it offered for whittling, started with it down the ravine.  Scoville was not in sight.  The moment was the one when he had quit looking for Reuther and wandered away up the ravine.  I have thought since that perhaps the glimpse he had got of his little one peering from the scene of his crime may have stirred even his guilty conscience and sent him off on this purposeless ramble; but, however this was, I did not see him or anybody else as I took my way leisurely down towards the bridge, whittling at the stick and thinking of what I should say to Mr. Etheridge when I met him.  And now for Fate’s final and most fatal touch!  Nothing which came into my mind struck me quite favourably.  The encounter which seemed such a very simple matter when I first contemplated it, began to assume quite a different aspect as the moment for it approached.  By the time I had come abreast of the Hollow, I was tired