ght to have spoken earlier if he meant to do good by
speaking. Confession, he said to himself would be self-indulgence now.

Hubert Lepel was wonderfully well versed, in subtle turns of
argument--in casuistry of the abstruser kind. It was long since he had
looked truth full in the face or drawn a sharp boundary-line between
right and wrong. Not easy to him was it to get back from the varying
lights and shadows of self-deception to the radiant sunshine of truth.
With bitter remorse in his heart and a strangely passionate wish to
do--now at least--the right, he yet decided to bear the burden of
silence until his dying day--to say no word, to do no act, that should
ever revive in others' minds the memory of the Beechfield tragedy. He
was not naturally callous, and he knew that concealment of the truth
would be, as it had always been, an oppression, a weary weight upon him;
but he had made up his mind that it must be so.

"Moralists tell us never to do evil that good may come," he murmured to
himself, with head bowed upon his knees; "but surely in this case, when
it is not--not altogether my own good that I seek, a little evil may be
pardoned, a little wrong condoned! Heaven forgive me! If I have sinned,
I think that I have suffered too!"

He lifted up his head at last, and saw the red light of sunset burning
between the upright stems of the fir-trees, stealing with strange
crimson tints amongst the yellowing bracken and umber drift of
pine-needles, scarcely touching, however, the black shades of the
foliage overhead. With a sudden shiver Hubert rose to his feet. It
seemed to him that the red light looked like blood. He turned hastily to
go; he had lingered too long, had excited his own emotions too keenly.
He resolved that he would never visit the lonely fir-wood again. He
wondered why it had stood so long. If he had been the General, he would
have had the trees hewn down after the trial, and done away with every
memento of the place.

When he escaped from the shadow of the wood, and saw the red sun setting
behind the hills, sending long level beams over the tranquil meadows,
and bathing field and grove and highway-road alike in ruddy golden
light, he drew a long breath of relief. And yet he felt that he was not
quite the same man that had entered the wood an hour before. The
foundations of his soul had been shaken; he had made a resolve; he
looked at life from a new standpoint. The half-defiant determination to
make t