"For pity's sake tell me what you mean; the suspense is terrible."
And then came the awful response, which sounded through the silent room like the knell to all the boy's future happiness and peace of mind.
"Thirty-one years ago to-night, in the heat of passion I killed a man in the kitchen yonder, and buried him under this floor, under my bed, and I have slept on his grave ever since!"
No wonder Grey's face grew white as the face of a corpse, while his heart throbbed with unutterable pain as he whispered the word his father had said aloud.
His grandfather, whom he had thought so good, and loved so much, a murderer! He had killed a man in that very room, perhaps on the spot where the boy was standing, and Grey recoiled from the place, and looked down upon the floor, which gave no sign of the tragedy enacted there thirty-one years ago, and kept hidden ever since.
Like a flash of lightning Grey saw all the past, and understood now what had been singular in his grandfather's manner and in his Aunt Hannah's, too; for she had been privy to the deed, and had helped to keep it from the world, and to Grey this was the bitterest thought of all, the one which made him sick, and faint and dizzy, as he groped his way to the door, which he opened and closed cautiously, and then fell heavily upon his face in the snow, with all consciousness for the moment blotted out.
The chill, however, and the damp revived him almost immediately, and struggling to his feet he started on his route back to Grey's Park along the same road he had come, seeing nothing, bearing nothing but that one word, that name his father had given to his grandfather, and which he, too, had echoed. Over and over again the winds repeated it until the, woods seemed full of it, and he said to himself:
"Will it always be so? Shall I never hear anything but that again so long as I live, and I am so young, only fourteen, and I meant to be a great and honorable man, and a good one, too. And I can still be that. God knows I am not to blame. Would he hear me, I wonder, if I should ask him now to take some of this pain away which fills my heart to bursting!"
And there, on the pure white snow, in the shadow of the leafless woods, the heart-broken boy knelt down, and with clasped hands, and the great tears streaming over his upturned face, asked God to forgive him for his grandfather's sin, and take the pain away, and help him to be a good man, if he could never be great and distinguished. And God heard that prayer made to him in the wintry night, from the depths of the boyish heart, and a feeling of quiet came over Grey as he resumed his walk.
"I am not to blame," he said, "and people will not think so if they know, which they never will, for father will not tell, nor Mr. Sanford either; but I shall always know, and life will never be the same to me again."