"Hope," he groaned, "hope?" as his broad shoulders heaved and the despairing sobs tore their way from his weary breast. "He does not know what she was to me--he cannot tell how I loved her. Mace, Mace, my darling, would to God I were lying by thy side!" It had grown quite dark now, and the founder sank upon his knees in the black ashes to lay his hands upon the young man's head. "Gil, my son," he whispered hoarsely, "forgive me, for I never knew your heart till now. In her name I ask you to forgive me for the wrong I would have done you both in tearing you apart. I thought I was doing right, but I am punished for my fault." "Forgive you!" groaned Gil, who, for the first time in his life, was quite unmanned. "Yes, I forgive you, if there is aught to forgive." He pressed the old man's hand, as he rose after a time, weak and desolate, to sit down upon one of the stones cast from the main building by the blast. Some distance away a couple of windows shed their feeble light, as if they were signals to Mace to open her casement once again, and a groan rose to Gil's lips as he thought of the past. Then, like a wandering spirit, a white, filmy-looking owl swept by them, turned and came back once more, as if attracted by the blackened ruins, glided to and fro for a few minutes, and it seemed to the two men that it shrieked faintly just over the very centre of the ruined house before it glided away. Gil sat watching the bird in a dreamy, hopeless way, and, as he gazed through the darkness, he felt that the place would become the home of such creatures. He was aroused from his reverie by the founder. "How did it happen, Gil?" he said. He spoke in a low, hoarse voice, but his Words sounded very plain in the silence of the autumn even. "How did it happen?" said Gil, repeating his words. "Yes, my boy, tell me all. I cannot believe that God would make that old woman with her curses his instrument to punish me." "I have little to tell," said Gil. "I saw our darling again and again, begging that she would go with me; but she refused till she found it hopeless to move you, and that the wedding was to be." "Yes, yes--go on," groaned the founder. "Then she consented, and I made my plans." "Yes, I see," replied the founder, "you were there with your men, and Sir Mark felt sure that you were coming. But yours was a mad revenge on him, and meant ruin and destruction to all." "I do not understand you," said Gil, quietly. "Did you think by blowing down part of the place to get her away in the confusion?" "Blow down? The place?" said Gil. "We had not a charge of powder with us. I left it all on board." "Then it was the store below caught first," said the founder, musingly; "but how--how?" "I cannot tell," said Gil. "Wat Kilby," exclaimed the founder, jumping at a cause for the terrible disaster; "he was smoking his tobacco by the entry, and must have thrown down the burning pipe."