ulthwaite. With an unspeakable look
of sympathy in his wild, timid eyes, as though some impulse of
affection urged him to throw his arms about Ralph and embrace him,
while some sense of shame impelled him to kneel at his feet, Sim
approached him, and appeared to make an effort to speak. But he could
say nothing. Ralph understood his silence and was grateful for it.
They went into the cave, and sat down in the dusk.

"You can tell me all about it, now," Ralph said, without preamble of
any sort, for each knew well what lay closest at the other's heart.
"He is gone now, and we are here together, with none but ourselves to
hear."

"I knew you must know it one day," Sim said, "but I tried hard to hide
it from you--I did, believe me, I tried hard--I tried, but it was not
to be."

"It is best so," Ralph answered; "you must not bear the burden of
guilt that is not your own."

"I'm no better than guilty myself," said Sim. "I don't reckon myself
innocent; not I. No, I don't reckon myself innocent."

"I think I understand you, Sim; but you were not guilty of the deed?"

"No, but I might have been--I might but for an accident--the accident
of a moment; but I've thought sometimes that the crime is not in the
deed, but the intention. No, Ralph, I _am_ the guilty man, after all:
your father had never thought of the crime, not he, but I had brooded
over it."

"Did you go out that night intending to do it?" Ralph said.

"Yes; at least I think I did, but I don't feel sure; my mind was in a
broil; I hardly knew what I meant to do. If Wilson had told me as I
met him in the road--as I intended to meet him--that he had come back
to do what he had threatened to do so often--then--yes, _then_, I must
have done it--I _must_."

"What had he threatened?" Ralph asked, but there was no note of
inquiry in his voice. "Whom did it concern?"

"It concerned yourself, Ralph," said Sim, turning his head aside. "But
no matter about that," he added. "It's over now, it is."

Ralph drew out of his pocket the paper that had fallen from his
father's breast.

"Is this what you mean?" he said, handing it to Sim.

Sim carried it to the light to read it. Returning to where Ralph sat,
he cried in a shrill voice,--

"Then he _had_ come back to do it. O God, why should it be murder to
kill a scoundrel?"

"Did you know nothing of this until now?"

"Nothing. Wilson threatened it, as I say; he told me he'd hang you on
the nearest gibbet, he did--you