It was a lie to say that a sin could be concealed. An evil act once done could never be undone; it could never be hidden away. A man might carry his sin out to sea, and bury it in the deepest part of the deep, but some day it would come scouring up before a storm as the broken seaweed came, to lie open and naked on the beach. The sky darkened and he turned back. On the way home he met Robbie Creer, and they had to shout to each other above the fury of the wind. The farmer had been over to the Nappin (the fields above the Point) and found hidden fissures in the soil three feet deep. They would lose land before morning. At dinner Janet did her best to make things cheerful. There was the sweet home atmosphere--the wood fire with its odour of resin and gorse, the snow-white table-cloth, the silver candlesticks, all the old-fashioned daintiness. But Stowell was preoccupied and hardly listened to Janet's chattering. So she went early to her room, saying she was sure he wished to be alone--his father always did, during the adjournment of a serious case. His father again! How her devotion to his father drove the iron into his soul! It was late and the rain had begun to slash the window-panes when he heard the front door bell ringing. After a few moments he heard it ringing again, more loudly and insistently. Nobody answered it. The household must be asleep. Then came a hurried knocking at the window of the dining-room and a voice, which was like the wind itself become articulate, crying out of the darkness, "Let me in!" It was Gell. For the first time in his life Stowell felt a spasm of physical fear. But he remembered something which Gell had said at the door of the railway carriage in Douglas on the day of the trial of the Peel fisherman ("I should have killed the other man"), and that strengthened him. Anything was better than the torture of a hidden sin--anything! "Go back to the door--I'll open it," he called through the closed window, and then he walked to the porch. His heart was beating hard. He thought he knew what was coming. But when Gell entered the house he was not the man Stowell had expected--with flaming eyes and passionate voice--but a poor, broken, irresolute creature. His hair was disordered, his step was weak and shuffling, and he was stretching out his nervous hands on coming into the light as if still walking in the darkness. "I had to come and tell you. She's guilty. She has confessed," he said. And then he collapsed into a chair and broke into pitiful moaning. It was too cruel. He could have taken the girl's word against the world, yet she had deceived him. "Did she say .... who...." "No." "No?" "I didn't ask. Some miserable farm-hand, I suppose--some brute, some animal. Damn him, whoever he is! Damn him! Damn him to the devil and hell!" Stowell felt a boundless relief, yet a sense of sickening duplicity.