“Gil, my son,” he whispered hoarsely, “forgive me, for I never knew your heart till now. In her name I ask you to forgive me for the wrong I would have done you both in tearing you apart. I thought I was doing right, but I am punished for my fault.”
“Forgive you!” groaned Gil, who, for the first time in his life, was quite unmanned. “Yes, I forgive you, if there is aught to forgive.”
He pressed the old man’s hand, as he rose after a time, weak and desolate, to sit down upon one of the stones cast from the main building by the blast. Some distance away a couple of windows shed their feeble light, as if they were signals to Mace to open her casement once again, and a groan rose to Gil’s lips as he thought of the past. Then, like a wandering spirit, a white, filmy-looking owl swept by them, turned and came back once more, as if attracted by the blackened ruins, glided to and fro for a few minutes, and it seemed to the two men that it shrieked faintly just over the very centre of the ruined house before it glided away.
Gil sat watching the bird in a dreamy, hopeless way, and, as he gazed through the darkness, he felt that the place would become the home of such creatures.
He was aroused from his reverie by the founder.
“How did it happen, Gil?” he said.
He spoke in a low, hoarse voice, but his Words sounded very plain in the silence of the autumn even.
“How did it happen?” said Gil, repeating his words.
“Yes, my boy, tell me all. I cannot believe that God would make that old woman with her curses his instrument to punish me.”
“I have little to tell,” said Gil. “I saw our darling again and again, begging that she would go with me; but she refused till she found it hopeless to move you, and that the wedding was to be.”