Hilary went upstairs. Opening the door he fell back a step. The model was in its old place on the work-table and near it stood a tall, gaunt, white figure.
His father turned toward him. He touched himself upon the breast. "I always told myself," he said, incoherently and hoarsely, "that there was a flaw in it—that something was lacking. I have said that for thirty years, and believed the day would come when I should remedy the wrong. To-night I know. The truth has come to me at last. There was no remedy. The flaw was in me," touching his hollow chest,—"in me. As I lay there I thought once that perhaps it was not real—that I had dreamed it all and might awake. I got up to see—to touch it. It is there! Good God!" as if a sudden terror grasped him. "Not finished!—and I——"
He fell into a chair and sank forward, his hand falling upon the model helplessly and unmeaningly.
Hilary raised him and laid his head upon his shoulder. He heard his mother at the door and cried out loudly to her.
"Go back!" he said. "Go back! You must not come in."
CHAPTER IV. JANEY BRIARLEY.
A week later Hilary Murdoch returned from the Broxton grave-yard in a drizzling rain, and made his way to the bare, cleanly swept chamber upstairs.
Since the night on which he had cried out to his mother that she must not enter, the table at which the dead man had been wont to sit at work had been pushed aside. Some one had thrown a white cloth over it. Murdoch went to it and drew this cloth away. He stood and looked down at the little skeleton of wood and steel. It had been nothing but a curse from first to last, and yet it fascinated him. He found it hard to do the thing he had come to do.