"He was a good man, Emmy, and a kind man--and just. I never knew any one
more just than Fulleymore. We were saying so only last night, weren't
we?"

"Yes, John," said Mrs. Randall. "We were saying you could always depend
upon his word. And, as _you_ say, there were things in him we never
knew--and never shall know."

And so it went on, with tearful breaks and long, oppressive silences,
until some one would think of some as yet unmentioned quality of Mr.
Ransome's. Every now and then, in the silences, one of them would be
visited by some involuntary memory of his unpleasantness and of the
furtive vice that had destroyed him, and would thrust the thought back
with horror, as outrageous, indecent, and impossible. They all spoke in
voices of profound emotion and with absolute, unfaltering conviction.

"We shall never know what was in him." Always they came back to that,
they dwelt on it, they clung to it. Under all the innocence and the
delusion it was as if, through their grief, they touched reality, they
felt the unaltered, unapparent splendor, and testified to the mystery,
to the ultimate and secret sanctity of man's soul.

* * * * *

Of all that Ransome was aware obscurely, he shared their sense of that
hidden and incalculable and enduring life. But his own grief was
different from theirs. It was something unique, peculiar to himself and
incommunicable.

Even he had not realized what was at the bottom of his grief until he
found himself alone with it, walking with it on the road to Southfields.
He had left the Randalls with his mother and had escaped, with an
irritable longing for the darkness and the open air. He knew that the
reason why he wanted to get away from them was that his grief was so
different from theirs.

For they were innocent; they had nothing to reproach themselves with. If
they had not loved his father quite so much as they thought they did,
they had done the next best thing; they had never let him know it. They
had behaved to him, they had thought of him, in consequence, more
kindly, more tenderly than if they _had_ loved him; in which case they
would not have felt the same obligation to be careful. They had never
hurt him. Whereas he--

That was why he would give anything to have his father back again. It
was all right for them. He couldn't think what they were making such a
fuss about. They had carried their behavior to such a pitch of
perfection that they