“And a rope the tenth, sir, is it not? Well, you may play your nine parts for me; only I, for what remains, am going to hang Mr Dalston.” The colour left his face. His new sprightliness was all gone in a moment. He returned to the desk, and seated himself, somewhat in his old tired attitude. “Well, Richard,” he said. “What else?” Emotion rose in me. I lingered on the blow I had to deal. But it must out at last. “I made a point, sir, if you observed, of referring to him as _calling_ himself my father.” “I noticed. He is not your father, then--only the vile deputy of another?” “No more my father, sir, I do believe, than Lady Skene is my mother. I was born of quite other parentage.” He held his eyes shaded with one hand. The shaking fingers of the other affected to toy with a pen. “Go on,” he muttered. “Why do you stop?” Without pause or hesitation, then, I gave him the full history of my inquisition, from the utterance of the first word which had launched me on it, to my final interview with his wife. And at the end, “Lord Skene,” I said, “judge all this as you will. There is still the worst to come--the corner-stone to such a monument of villainy as I never dreamed of unveiling when I started. I beg, sir, with all the passion of entreaty I can command, that you will brace yourself to hear a very dreadful truth. I told you, on that former occasion, that I had come by accident upon part of a letter written by your son to Mr Thesiger. Here it is.” I laid the faded sheet before him. He read it through once, twice, three times; and looked up at me with a lost expression. “Well?” he whispered hoarsely. “It is your son’s, sir?” “Yes, it is from Charlie.” “The reference in it, sir--the ‘You-know-who’?” “Yes--well?” “Is to Mrs Dalston, I cannot doubt. _He_ was married to her first.” “Who? Charlie?” “Yes; and, because of it--O! sir, for all it means to you, compose yourself to meet the blow--_because of it, was done to death by the man who is now Mrs Dalston’s husband, and your own wife’s damned betrayer._” His head sank low. I thought, for all my warning, I had risked too much. But in a moment he lifted it again, and the expression on it, stern, white, self-repressed, was such, I imagined, as might have marked its character when, in past days, he would rise, black-capped, to sentence a prisoner to the last awful penalty. “On what authority,” he began, in a quick loud voice, which sank even upon its utterance--“on what authority?”--and the words died out in a whisper.