“There’s more in it than that--and he’s right, Janet. We were wrong, you and I. And I must just abide the consequences. I’ll lie down on your bed for an hour or two, if you’re sure it’s safe. And then I’ll take the gate. It will be for ever this time, you can tell that boy. I’ll neither make nor meddle more; and if he’s wise he’ll let sleeping dogs lie.” CHAPTER VIII. Robert Dalyell stole forth from the house which was his own, yet could never more be his, in what would have been the dead of night had it been any other season but June and any place but a northern country. It was already daylight, with a pearl-like radiance as of spiritual day, and something more mystic and almost awful in the silence of night, combined with this diffusion of lovely light, than any darkness could have been. He seemed to see the great spreading landscape like a picture, with his own single and solitary figure in it, with a momentary terror of himself alone in that great surrounding silence. He was not afraid of being seen, as he was when he had stolen under cover of the brief darkness into the house; but it occurred to him that anybody who should look out of a curtained window or from the crevice of a closed shutter, and see him walking along at an hour when nobody was abroad, would be afraid of him as an unnatural wanderer in the wide brightness which was night. He was in point of fact a ghost, as he had been believed to be--a man with no place or meaning in the world, with his name upon a funeral tablet, and his place knowing him no more; and like a ghost he passed through the pale diffused light which cast no shadow. Never man was in a position more strange and cruel. He had made the sacrifice of his life, not as his son and his friend had feared, by suicide, but in a more dreadful way. He had put himself to death, and yet he lived. The man had been in this living death for nearly two years. He had lost everything--himself, his name, and his personal identity, as well as wife and children, and home and living. And yet he had never fully realised what it was till now. Something of the Bohemian, something of the adventurer in the man, which had been hidden under the most decorous exterior for nearly fifty years, had made that curious new start in existence almost amusing to him in its absolute novelty and relief from the long monotony of usual life.