e dark hours of the night;
for you are my only son, and I looked that you and she whom God might
choose for you should be the delight and support of my old age. But it
is not to be. God has, for His own good purposes, not blessed me as He
has blessed others, and the home for which I hoped I am not to have. Oh,
my son, my son!" He had meant to say more, but at the moment he could
not.

"Father, father!" said Robert, much moved--the anger he usually felt at
his father's references to Susan Shipton melting into pity--"why not?
why not? You don't know Susan; you condemn her just because she don't go
to our meeting. She shall love you like your own child."

Another man would, perhaps, have relented, but his system was wrought
into his very marrow--a part of himself in a manner incomprehensible.
The distinction between the world and the Church is now nothing to us.
We are on the best of terms with people who every Sunday are expressly
assigned to everlasting fire. But to Michael the distinction was what it
was to Ephraim MacBriar. The Spirit descended on him--whose spirit, it
is not for us to say.

"Are you sure of Miss Shipton, Robert?"

"Sure of her, father! What do you mean?"

"Do you know what she has been in time past?"

"I don't understand you."

"Do you know why Cadman left the Shiptons?"

Robert stopped suddenly as if struck by a blow, and then his behaviour
instantly changed. He completely forgot himself and was furious.

"Father, I say it is a wicked, cruel shame--a wicked, cruel lie. I do
not care if I tell you so. I will not listen to it," and he tore himself
away.

He believed it was a lie--believed it with the same distinctness as he
believed in the existence of the hedge by his side which lacerated his
hand as he turned round; and yet the lie struck him like a poisoned
barbed arrow, and he could not drag himself loose from it. No man could
have loved Desdemona better than Othello, and yet, before there was any
evidence, did he not say of Iago--

"This honest creature doubtless
Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds."

He went home, and on his way to his room upstairs he passed through the
little office in which he and his father made out their bills and kept
their accounts. On the desk lay half a sheet of a letter. He looked at
it at first mechanically, and then began to read with the most intense
interest. It was only half a sheet, and the other half was