"I am sorry, uncle," he said earnestly, "I have come to look on these things a little differently. Many years ago, in America, I used to wonder what it was that kept you apart from every one else, kept the smile from your lips, made you accept good fortune or ill without any sign of feeling. I was too young to understand then, but I realise everything now. I know how you denied yourself to send me to school and college. I know how you left yourself almost a beggar when you gave me the chance of my life and trusted me with all your savings. These things I shall never forget." "One word, lad," Vont interrupted. "It's the truth you say. I trusted you with well-nigh all I had that stood between me and starvation, but I trusted you with it on one condition. Do you mind that condition? We sat outside the little shanty I'd built with my own hands, up in the Adirondacks there, and before us were the mountains and the woods and the silence. We were close to God up there, David. You remember?" "I remember." "You'd come hot-foot from the city, and you told me your story. I sat and listened, and then I told you mine. I told you of the shame that had driven me from England, and I told you of the thoughts that were simmering in my mind. As we sat there your wrath was as mine, and the oath which I had sworn, you swore, too. I lent you the money over that oath, boy. Look back, if you will. You remember the night? There was a hot wind--cool before it reached us, though--rushing up from the earth, rushing through the pine trees till they shook and bowed around us; and a moon, with the black clouds being driven across it, looking down; and the smell of the pines. You remember?" "I remember," David repeated. "We stood there hand in hand, and there was no one to hear us except those voices that come from God only knows where, and you swore on your soul that you would help me as soon as the time came to punish the man who had blasted my life. In my way you promised--not yours. There should be no will but mine. For this one thing I was master and you were slave, and you swore." "I swore. I am not denying it," David acknowledged. "Haven't I made a start? Haven't I deceived the man at whose table I sat and laid a plot to ruin him? And I have ruined him! Do you want more than this?" "Yes!" was the unshaken reply. "Then what, in heaven's name, is it?" David demanded. "Out with it, for God's sake! I carry this whole thing about with me, like a weight upon my soul. Granted that you are master and I am slave. Well, I've done much. What is there left?" "That you will be told in due season." "And meantime," David continued passionately, "I am to live in a sort of prison!" "You've no need to find it such," the old man declared doggedly. David sprang to his feet. The time had come for his appeal. The words seemed to rush to his lips. He was full of confidence and hope.