He was not sorry when the old iron gate closed upon him. Never till to-night had he left the house that sheltered Lucille without a pang of regret, but to-night, after the discovery of the portrait in the loft, he felt in sore need of solitude. He wanted to look his situation straight in the face. This man—the man his hand had slain—was the father of his promised wife. The hand that he was to give to Lucille at the altar was red with her father’s blood. Most hideous thought, most bitter fatality which had brought that villain across his path out yonder in the trackless forest. Was this world so narrow that they two must needs meet—that no hand save his could be found to wreak God’s vengeance upon that relentless savage? Her father! And in the veins of that gentle girl, who in her innocent youth had seemed to him fair and pure as the snowdrop unfolding its white bells from out a bed of newly-fallen snow, there ran the blood of that most consummate scoundrel! All his old theories of hereditary instincts were at fault here. From such a sire so sinless a child! The thought tortured him. Could he ever look at that sweet pensive face again without conjuring up the vision of that wild haggard visage he had seen in the red glare of the pine-logs, those hungry savage eyes, gleaming athwart elf-locks of shaggy hair, and trying to find a strange distorted likeness between the two faces? And this horrible secret he must keep to his dying day. One hint, one whisper of the fatal truth, and he and Lucille would be sundered for ever. Did honour counsel him to confess that deed of his in the forest? Did honour oblige him to tell this girl that all her hopes of reunion with the father she had loved so dearly were vain; that his hand had made a sudden end of that guilty life, cut off the sinner in his prime, without pause for repentance, without time even to utter one wild appealing cry to his God? True that the man had declared himself an infidel, that he was steeped to the lips in brutish selfishness, grovelling, debased, hardened in sin. Who should dare say that repentance was impossible, even for a wretch so fallen? Far as the east is from the west are the ways of God from the ways of man, and in His infinite power there are infinite possibilities of mercy and forgiveness.