The old man stood there in the moonlight, his face agitated and his lips quivering. "I can hear the master's voice again," he murmured. "Time seems to have gone back with me. It is as if you had come like a ghost from the grave, Mr. Ralph. And it was close here that your father stood, after the great quarrel, and swore that Dashwood Hall should see him no more. . . . And so you have come back to claim your own, sir?" "I must be very like my father, or what my father was like forty years ago," Ralph said thoughtfully. "Sit down, Slight, please don't stand looking at me like that. I did not expect to be recognized in this way, and I am not here to claim my own, at least, not in the fashion that you mean. My father chose deliberately to forfeit his inheritance. My grandfather gave him the chance of coming into his own again. But he always refused, as you know, Slight. And now Sir George Dashwood reigns in his stead." "The estate, the title--everything is yours, Sir Ralph," Slight said doggedly. "No, no. Forty years ago there was a great upheaval here. It was a quarrel that could never be patched up or healed. At the bottom of it was family pride, the accursed kind of pride that stifles every feeling of humanity and turns hearts into flints as hard as the nether millstone. The upshot of that quarrel was a permanent separation between my grandfather and the present dowager Lady Dashwood; it drove my father into exile. It broke the heart of one of the best and truest women that ever lived. And all this to keep from so-called contamination the blood of the Dashwoods. Before my father went away he took steps to make his sacrifice complete. He executed a deed cutting off the entail of the estate, so that the late Sir Ralph could do what he pleased with it." "I don't quite understand that, Sir Ralph," Slight said. "Don't address me by that title," Darnley replied. "Let me explain. Most people believe that a family estate like ours cannot be left elsewhere. But if the heir likes to execute a deed for the purpose of cutting off the entail as it is called, why, the holder for the time being can do what he likes with the property. My father did this with his eyes wide open, and you witnessed the deed, Slight." "I recollect it," Slight said slowly. He made the admission grudgingly. "It was my task to deliver it into the hands of old Sir Ralph. If I had only known!"