A traveller with staff and knapsack came along the road, gazing absently before him, evidently oblivious of the magic of the moon-lit landscape. It was the young lieutenant, on his way home to bury the father whose memory was held in such universal detestation. His host had put his best equipage at his disposal, but his comrade had firmly refused to accept the offer, and he had been obliged to content himself with accompanying his guest part of the way on foot. At parting he had solemnly affirmed that the compact of eternal friendship that they had entered into as brothers-in-arms after their first baptism of fire would hold good now and always, "the sins of the fathers" notwithstanding. Whenever he was in need of help and sympathy in the future, he might rely on the good-will of him and his neighbours. This was meant well, but brought no comfort to the young man's sore heart. The allusion to "the sins of the fathers" stung him to the quick. It sounded very much like an insult, yet an insult that he was powerless to resent openly, as there was no shuffling off the incubus of shame which, as his father's heir, now weighed on his innocent shoulders. Thus fiercely brooding he walked on, and pictures of the past involuntarily rose before his mental vision. He had never loved his father--the harsh, tyrannical man who flogged the peasants, whose laughter was more terrible than his oaths, to whom he, his only son, had been not much more than the pet dog that one minute was allowed to bite his heels when he was in a good humour, only to be hurled across the room the next with a savage kick. As long as he could remember, the small muscular figure, the sallow face with its high cheek-bones, coal-black goat's beard, and little keen grey eyes, had been the terror of his childhood. His mother he had never known. She had succumbed, a few years after his birth, to a long and tedious illness. It was rumoured at the time, in the village, that her lord's ungovernable passions had been the death of her--that his love was as terrible as his hate. Her picture had hung at the end of a long line of ghostly portraits in the dimly-lighted picture-gallery with its vaulted roof, where one's footsteps echoed uncannily between the stone walls, and where it was possible to shiver with cold on the hottest summer day.... The picture of a gentle, tired-looking woman with thin bloodless lips, and half-closed lids that seemed to droop from sheer weariness and lack of spirit.