“I thought it was. It didn’t trouble me much, for all that. I learned confidence in the presence of this strong good fellow here.”
“Dad, we’ve £30 left of the fifty I raised two months ago on that Julian medallion. May I have ten of them?”
“Ten pounds, Renalt? That’s a mighty gap in the hoard.”
“I want it for a particular purpose. You can trust me not to ask you if it were to be avoided.”
He gave a deep sigh.
“Take it, then. It isn’t in you to misapply a trust.”
He turned his face away with a slight groan. Poor old man! My soul cried out with remorse to so trouble his confidence in me. Yet what I proposed seemed to me best.
He would not rise and come down to supper when I suggested it.
“Let me lie here,” he said. “Sometimes it seems to me, Renalt, I’m breaking up—that the wheel down there crows and sings for a victim again.”
It was the first time I had ever heard him directly refer to this stormy heart of the old place, that had throbbed out so incessantly its evil influence over the lives shut within range of it. It was plunging and murmuring now in the depths below us, so insistent even at that distance that the soft whining of the stones in our more immediate neighborhood was scarcely audible.