“I am not married, father; and, before God, sooner than be forced to refuse you I would lie as you lie now. Have pity, I beseech you, on my cruel strait, between my honour and the denial of your wish. I cannot promise that I will marry Emma Levinger, because I am bound to another woman by ties that may not be broken, and I cannot be so base as to desert her.” “Another woman? I am too late, then?” murmured his father more and more feebly. “But stay: there is still hope. Who is she? At least you will not refuse to tell me her name.” “Her name is Joan Haste.” “Joan Haste? What! the girl at the inn? The bastard! My son, my only remaining son, denies his dying father, and brings his mother and his name to disgrace and ruin, because he is bound in honour to a village bastard!” he screamed. “Oh, my God! that I should have lived to hear this! Oh, my God! my God!” And suddenly the old man flung his arms wide and fell back. Lady Graves and Ellen ran to him. Presently the former came away from the bed. “Your father is dead, Henry,” she said. “Perhaps, after what has passed, you will feel that this is no fit place for you. I will ring for some one to take you to your room.” But the last bitterness of these words, so awful from a mother’s lips, was spared to Henry, for he had swooned. As he sank into unconsciousness a solemn voice seemed to speak within his tortured brain, and it said, “Behold the firstfruits of iniquity.” Henry did not attend his father’s funeral, for the good reason that he was ill in bed. In the first place, though he made light of it at the time, that slip of his on the stone steps had so severely affected his broken limb as to necessitate his lying by for at least another month; and in the second he had received a shock to his nerves, healthy as they were, from which he could not hope to recover for many a month. He was kept informed of all that went on by Thomson, the old butler, for neither his mother nor Ellen came near him during those dark days. He heard the footsteps of the carpenter who measured his father’s body, he heard the coffin being brought upstairs; and the day afterwards he heard the shuffling tramp of the tenants, who, according to ancient custom, bore down the corpse of the dead owner of Rosham to lie in state in the great hall. He heard the workmen nailing the hatchment of the departed baronet beneath his window; and then at last a day came when he heard a noise of the rolling wheels of carriages, and the sound of a church bell tolling, as his father was laid to rest among the bones of his ancestors.