Ewan listened to the hot words that came from his father in a rapid and ceaseless whirl. The story was all so fatally circumstantial as the Deemster told it; no visions; no sights; no sneezings of an old woman; all was clear, hard, deadly, damning circumstance, or seemed to be so to Ewan's heated brain and poisoned heart.
"Father," he said, very quietly, but with visible emotion, "you are my father, but there are only two persons alive from whose lips I would take a story like this, and you are not one of them."
At that word the Deemster's passion overcame him. "My God," he cried, "what have I done that I should not be believed by my own son? Would I slander my own daughter?"
But Ewan did not hear him. He had turned away, and was going toward the door of Mona's room. He moved slowly; there was an awful silence. Full half a minute his hand rested on the door handle, and only then did his nervous fingers turn it.
He stepped into the room. The room was empty. It was Mona's sitting-room, her work-room, her parlor, her nursery. Out of it there opened another room by a door at the further end of the hall on the left.
The door of that other room was ajar, and Ewan could hear, from where he now stood quivering in every limb, the soft cooing of the child—his child, his dead wife's child—and the inarticulate nothings that Mona, the foster-mother, babbled over it.
"Boo-loo-la-la-pa-pa," "Dearee-dearee-dear," and then the tender cooing died off into a murmur, and an almost noiseless, long kiss on the full round baby-neck.
Ewan stood irresolute for a moment, and the sweat started from his forehead. He felt like one who has been kneeling at a shrine when a foul hand besmudges it. He had half swung about to go back, when his ear caught the sound of the Deemster's restless foot outside. He could not go back: the poison had gone to his heart.
He stepped into the bedroom that led out of the sitting-room. Mona raised her eyes as her brother entered. She was leaning over the cot, her beautiful face alive with the light of a tender love—a very vision of pure and delicious womanhood. Almost she had lifted the child from the cot to Ewan's arms when at a second glance she recognized the solemn expression of his face, and then she let the little one slide back to its pillow.
"What has happened?"