"This is some fancy."
"It is not!" said Patrick Ruthven, emphatically.
"Then can I make amends?"
"You may, if it is not too late, my poor Roland. Oh, my God!"
These mysterious words filled the listener with genuine grief and alarm. Was it all some hallucination? What did they import or refer to? For much in his father's moody and wayward life, in his latter years especially, seemed to corroborate them, and to hint that there was "a skeleton in the house," as the doctor had ventured to say.
"I will have no clergyman about me," said the sufferer, petulantly and almost passionately, in reply to some remark of Roland's.
"Why?"
"I hope to make my peace with God alone. The Reverend Ephraim Howie, to whom I gave the living of Ardgowrie! What can he, or such as he, do for me now?"
"Oh, father!"
"No one ever prospered who grew rich by fraud, it has been said—yet have I, in a manner, prospered," added the old man, as if communing with himself.