‘You cannot get it out of Henry Glenlyne,’ answered Ferdinand Sivewright. ‘He has slipped comfortably into his grave and escaped all reckoning. He was always a sneak.’ ‘Enough. We must look for justice to God, if man withhold it. There is some one here who wishes to see you—some one you have wronged as deeply as you wronged Lucille. Can you bear to see your wife—my sister Janet?’ ‘What, is she here too? You come like the ghosts that circled crook-back Richard’s bed at Bosworth.’ ‘Will you see your wife?’ asked Lucius quietly. ‘Yes. She’ll not reproach me now. Let her come.’ ‘Janet.’ Janet came softly to the bed, and knelt beside the man whose influence had once been all-powerful to lead her. ‘Can _you_ forgive me?’ he asked, looking at her with those awful eyes, whose intensity was slowly lessening as the dull shade of death dimmed them. ‘Can _you_ forgive? I wronged you worst of all, for I told you a lie on purpose to break your heart. You are my lawful wife—I had no other—never loved any other woman. I stole you secretly from your home because I knew my character couldn’t stand investigation, and if I had wooed you openly there’d have been all manner of inquiries. I knew the keen prying ways of your petty provincial gentry. It was easier to make the business a secret, and thus escape all danger.’ ‘You gave me a bitter burden to bear in all these years,’ Janet answered gently; ‘but I am grateful even for this tardy justice. May God forgive you as I do!’ She covered her face with her hands, and her head sank on the coverlet of the bed, as she knelt in silent prayer. There could be little to be said between these two. Janet’s wrongs were too deep for many words. Ferdinand stretched out his hand with a feeble wandering movement, and the tremulous fingers rested on his wife’s bent head—rested there with a light and tender touch, it might be in blessing. ‘Father, will you not say one prayer?’ asked Lucille piteously. ‘I will say anything to please you,’ he answered. ‘No, no, not for me, but for your own sake! God is all goodness; even to those who turn to Him at the eleventh hour. His mercies are infinite.’ ‘They had need be if I am to have any part in them.’ Lucille repeated the Lord’s Prayer slowly, the dying man repeating it after her, in Latin—the words he had learned in his boyhood when he went to mass with his mother at the chapel in Spanish-place. They stayed with him all that day, Lucille reading, at intervals, words of hope and comfort from the Gospel—words which may have pierced even those dull ears with some faint promise, may have kindled some vague yearning for divine forgiveness even in that hardened heart. The sinner seemed at intervals to listen; there was a grateful look now and then in the tired eyes.