Underneath, in the same delicate hand, were the three tiny initials that he had seen upon the sketch in water-colors.
The strong man groaned aloud as he looked; the photograph dropped from his nervous fingers, and he shook like one with the ague. He wiped the sweat from his brow; he rubbed his eyes as if to clear his vision, and looked again, comparing the two faces.
But only to groan again more bitterly than before.
There could be no doubt that both pictures were of the same person, only taken at different times; one during happy girlhood days, the other at a maturer age, and to gratify the wishes of her son.
“Earle Wayne her son! Earle Wayne, the prisoner, the—criminal! Great heaven!” he cried, with ashen lips, and in tones expressive of intense horror and fear.
Then, with a round oath, he threw both pictures from him as if they burned him, and, leaping to his feet, began pacing excitedly back and forth upon the floor.
“What shade of evil has sent this thing to confront me at this late hour of my life?” he cried, with exceeding bitterness. “Did I not have enough of disappointment and regret to bear at that time without being reminded of it in this way now? I was cheated, foiled out of what I would almost have given half a life-time to have attained. Oh! if I had only known—why was there no one to tell me? Why——”
He stopped in the midst of his walk, and clenched his hands and ground his teeth in fiercest wrath.
“I was a fool!—an idiot! I hate myself, I hate her—I hate all the world, who knew and did not tell me. And he is her son, he is——
“Ah! I have never loved him any too well—I love him far less now, for—he is a living monument of my defeat. No wonder he is proud; no wonder he bore his trial with such fortitude, if he possesses a tithe of the spirit and resolution that she possessed and displayed more than twenty years ago. I wish he had five times three years to serve; but I’ll crush him when he comes out, as I would like to crush every one who knew at that time, and did not tell me. He may go to the ——. It is nothing to me if he is innocent, and yet a prisoner. It shall not disturb me, and I will not have my enjoyment destroyed by this grim phantom of the past. I’ll cast care and worry to the winds, be merry, and go my own way; but—let him look out that he does not cross my path again,” he concluded, with a fierceness that was terrible to observe.