--"I Will Confess my Wickedness"_

Everard is free, and, wearing the grey suit of a discharged prisoner, is
travelling from Dartmoor to London by train. Marion, his brother,
Leslie, Mrs. Maitland, and the admiral are all dead. Everything is
strange and changed to him. Liberty is sweet and bitter. He is
prematurely aged and broken down; the great future that had been before
him is now for ever impossible. His still undeveloped scientific
theories and discoveries have been anticipated by others. He feels the
prison taint upon him; he will not see Lilian until it is removed, and
he has become accustomed to the bewilderment of freedom.

After a few days' pause he starts from London for Malbourne, stopping at
Belminster, through which he had made his last free journey with Cyril,
when he told him that "an ascetic is a rake turned monk." Passing the
gaol in which he had suffered so much, he goes to the cathedral. He asks
who is now Dean of Belminster.

The verger is surprised. "Where have you been, sir, not to have heard of
the celebrated Dean Maitland?" The great dean! The books he has written,
the things he has done! All the world knows Dean Maitland, the greatest
preacher in the Church of England.

The deanery interior. Cyril, charming and adored as ever, is considering
whether he shall accept the historic bishopric of Warham. A strange
youth from America is announced, and asks the dean to give him a
university education--"because I am your son." "Since when," returns the
dean tranquilly, "have you been suffering from this distressing
illusion?" The youth bears a letter from Alma. She is dying in
Belminster, and implores him to come to her. She cannot die, she writes,
till she has cleared Everard. After this terrible scene Cyril is in
agony, and nearly commits suicide. "But one sin in a life so spotless!"
he moans. The same evening Everard, overwhelmed with accounts of Cyril's
good deeds and spiritual counsels, and examining with mingled awe and
pity the numerous books he has written, goes to hear one of the Anglican
Chrysostom's lectures to working men in the cathedral.

The music heard by Cyril during his mental conflict there years before
is being played. Cyril thinks Lee's death and Henry's suffering the work
of Fate, since in wearing Everard's clothes he had no thought of
impersonating him, but only of avoiding the publicity of clerical dress;
nor had he dreamed of meeting or of struggling with Ben Lee. Meaning