And the next morning, before any in the castle were awake, the Baron went with his daughter down the turret-stairs, and through a postern gate, down the steep, and through the forest to the hermit's hut.
And the Baron knelt and wept like a child at the hermit's feet.
His was a long shrift. Crimes about which there could be no self-deception, a life of high-handed wrong. The first wrong which won him his kinsman's heritage had placed him almost inevitably among the beasts of prey, and made his dwelling a den of rapine. Yet, happily for him, he had preserved unsoiled the belief in a just and avenging God. Sullenly, hopelessly, he had pursued his track of violence; but he had never been able to falsify to himself this vision of the Just One, or to hope to appease Him by any payment or fine, save the one he thought it hopeless to attempt, the reversal of his wrong-doings and leading a just life.
And now on the Face he had believed irrevocably set against him, for the first time he had seen the yearning of forgiving pity, not only for the wronged, but for him, the criminal.
A ray of hope, a beam of holy Almighty love dawned on the long polar night of his soul, and the ice began to melt. And in the light of that hope he dared to stand face to face with his sins.
But the long array rising before him from his own lips, reflected in the compassionate sternness of the hermit's eyes, seemed to crush him to the dust; and when he came out from that terrible hour, he seemed to his young daughter to have shrunk into a feeble old man.
She drew close to him and laid her hand in his; but as they moved away, it seemed to her as if it were no longer he who sustained her, but she who sustained him.
"The holy man has given thee counsel, father," she said tenderly.
"He bids me call all our people together, at once," he said, "and confess to them my sin, and bid them proclaim my intention of restitution. That," he said, "is at once the truest penance, and the surest way to find the means of restitution."
"I will be beside thee, father," she said. "All thy burdens are mine."