“For a time I worked it, to some profit. We began not all empty-handed. She brought a little with her.” “My mother?” At the word he half-started from his chair and sunk back into it again. His eyes blazed as I had not seen them do since my return. “For twenty years and more,” he shrieked, “that name has never been on your lips--on the lips of any one of you. I would have struck him down without pity that spoke it!” I stood looking at him amazed. For a moment he seemed transformed--translated out of his fallen self--for a moment and no more. His passion left him quakingly. “Ah!” he cried, with a gasp, and looked up at me beseeching--“you’re not offended--you are not offended, Renalt?” “No, no,” I said, impatiently. “You must tell me why, dad. You will, won’t you?” He answered with a sobbing moan. “You, her son, must not know. Haven’t I been faithful to her? Have I ever by word or sign dishonored her memory in her children’s ears--my boy, have I?” “I have never heard you mention her till now. I have never dreamed of her but as a nameless shadow, father.” “Let her be so always. She wrecked my life--in a day she made me the dark brute you remember well. I was not so always, Renalt. This long, degraded life of despair and the bestial drowning of it were her doing--hers, I tell you. Remorse! It has struggled to master me, and I have laughed it away--all these years I have laughed it away. Yet it was pitiful when she died. A heart of stone would have wept to see her. But mine was lead--lead--lead.” He dropped his head on his breast. I stood darkly pondering in the quiet room. There seemed a stir and rustling all round within the house, as if ghostly footfalls were restlessly pacing out their haunting penance. “Renalt,” said my father, presently; “never speak of her; never mention her by that name. She passed and left me what I am. I closed the mill and shut its door and that of my heart to every genial influence that might help it to forget. I had no wish to forget. In silence and solitariness I fed upon myself till I became like to a madman. Then I roused and went abroad more, for I had a mission of search to attend to.” “You never found him?” The words came to my lips instinctively. How could I fail to interpret that part, at least, of the miserable secret? “To this day--never.” He answered preoccupied--suddenly heedless of my assurance in so speaking. A new light had come to his face--an unfamiliar one. I could have called it almost the reflection of cunning--vanity--a self-complacent smugness of retrospect. “But I found something else,” he cried, with a twitching smirk. “What was that?” He leaned forward in a listening attitude. “Hush!” he murmured. “Was that a noise in the house?” “I heard nothing, dad.” He beckoned me to stand closer--to stoop to him. “A jar of old Greek and Roman coins.”