They sought Tom's father, to find him, as Mary had said, walking up and down, with fierce joy of battle on his thin, stern face and in his shining eyes. "Now shall the powers of Light triumph and the will of God be done!" he said to them. He made no demur, however, when they drew him away. "The future is mine," he declared, and grew calm. "You cannot stand between me and my duty again, Sir Walter. You have gravely erred, and this is the result of your error. But you will not err a second time." His excitation ceased, and it was he who proposed that they should return to their forgotten meal. In the matter of the man just dead, he revealed an indifference almost callous. "His God will justly judge him according to his deserving," he declared. "If he sinned through ignorance and false teaching, his punishment will not be heavy; if he hardened his heart against truth and rejected the faith from pride--but even then the Father of Mercy may pardon him. He has failed, even as I knew he must, and paid a terrible penalty for failure." Sir Walter, sorely stricken, hardly heard the other. He ate a little at Mary's entreaty, then, driven by some impulse to leave his fellow-creatures and court solitude, excused himself, begged Lennox and Mannering to bring him news when the telegram dispatched to Scotland Yard was answered, and prepared to leave them. As he rose, he marked his old spaniel standing whimpering by his side. "What is the matter with Prince?" he asked. "He has not had his dinner," said Mary. "Let him be fed at once," answered her father, and went out alone. She rose to follow him immediately, but Mannering, who had stopped and was with them, begged her not to do so. "Leave him to himself," he said. "This has shaken your father, as well it may. He's all right. Make him take his bromide to-night, and let nobody do anything to worry him." The master of Chadlands meantime went afield, walked half a mile to a favorite spot, and sat down upon a seat that he had there erected. A storm was blowing up from the south-west, and the weather of his mind welcomed it. He alternated between bewilderment and indignation. His own life-long philosophy and trust in the ordered foundations of human existence threatened to fail him entirely before this second stroke. It seemed that the punctual universe was suddenly turned upside down, and had emptied a vial of horror upon his innocent head.