"My brother," he said, breaking the silence at last, "I wish I was dead instead of my father. Why did he go out into the storm?"
"He went to find you, Martin," answered Dorothy.
"To find me!" he cried, "to find me!"
A gleam of gladness came across his heavy face, and into his deep-set eyes; and he raised himself from the ground to pace up and down the floor, murmuring, "To find me," again and again to himself. Once he approached the closed door of the library, and knelt before it, crossing himself devoutly, and whispering a prayer, such as he was wont to say at the foot of the Calvary. After a while he returned to the hearth, where Philip and Dorothy had been anxiously watching him.
"My father went out into the storm to find me," he said with glistening eyes. "I shall know him now when I see him again in Paradise."
How long they waited they never knew; but at last from the soundless room Margaret came out, white as death, but with a radiant look upon her face such as they had never seen before. Dorothy and Philip stood up in awed silence but Martin fell down on his knees as she drew near to them. She laid her hands upon his shoulders and, bending over him, laid her lips upon his wrinkled forehead.
It was the seal of such a pardon as few women are called upon to give. This man had cost her all that she most prized on earth. He was the living memorial of her husband's sin. He would thrust her firstborn son out of his birthright. As long as she lived he would be to her the symbol of all earthly anguish, and love, and bitterness. But her heart was melted with inexpressible pity for him, a pity which his dark mind could never understand. Nothing but this mute and solemn caress could tell him that she pitied and loved him.
Dorothy understood it more fully than the others did, and, throwing her arms around Margaret, she burst into a passion of tears.