“I seen you leave that old fool of a horse go his own sweet way, so I knowed you was fig’erin’ out some old law-soot or other. I was wonderin’ haow long you’d set there. Wall, it was a gre’t day yes’day, wa’n’t it?” RoBards could laugh with the farmer heartily, for it showed how innocent his reverie looked to a witness; it showed that Albeson had not discovered anything amiss about the home. He breathed elixir in the air and drove on to the house, finding it as always a mirror to his humor. It had been in turn an ancestral temple, a refuge from plague, a nuptial bower, a shelter for intrigue, a whited sepulcher. The tree had been a priest, a hypocrite, and now a faithful sentinel. He was brought down again when Mrs. Albeson met him with a query: “How’s pore little Immy?” She whispered, though there was no one else in the house. “Mis’ Lasher has been takin’ on terrible along of her boy Jud lightin’ out for sea. Pity you let him live, for they do say a man what’s borned to be hung won’t never git drownded.” This was an exquisite plight: to be blamed for sparing the life he had already taken. But he dared not give the noisy woman more of his confidence. Immy’s fate was enough in her power. He dared not visit the cellar till the farmers had gone to bed, and then he went down into it as into a grave. It was morbidly cold and the lamp shivered in his hand. He found everything as he had left it, and marveled at the neatness of his work. Yet it seemed not to be his work, but the work of somebody who had borrowed his frame and used his scholarship for cunning purposes. He went back to the library. In this room his soul had found its world. But now it was an impossible place. The hearthstone there—Chalender had brought it—it was a headstone over a buried honor. He had often resolved to tear it out and break it to dust. But now it covered Jud Lasher, and served him as an anonymous memorial. What was the quicklime doing down inside there? His heart stopped. Perhaps it would not work sealed away from the air. He ought to open the walls and see. And this set him to trembling in utter confusion, for he recognized in his own bewilderment the unintelligent maudlin reasoning of the criminal. Already he had revisited the scene; already debated an exhumation; already longed to talk to someone, to boast perhaps. He was afraid to trust himself to the house, and, making an excuse of having come for some books and papers, set off again for the city. When he got down from the cab in front of his home he found Keith in the bit of front yard. The boy was so absorbed in his task that he greeted his father absently, as if RoBards were the child and he the old one. He had dug a shallow channel from the hydrant to the iron railing, and was laying down pipes of tin and cardboard and any other rubbish he could find.