“No, but I might have been—I might but for an accident—the accident of a moment; but I've thought sometimes that the crime is not in the deed, but the intention. No, Ralph, I am the guilty man, after all: your father had never thought of the crime, not he, but I had brooded over it.”
“Did you go out that night intending to do it?” Ralph said.
“Yes; at least I think I did, but I don't feel sure; my mind was in a broil; I hardly knew what I meant to do. If Wilson had told me as I met him in the road—as I intended to meet him—that he had come back to do what he had threatened to do so often—then—yes, then, I must have done it—I must.”
“What had he threatened?” Ralph asked, but there was no note of inquiry in his voice. “Whom did it concern?”
“It concerned yourself, Ralph,” said Sim, turning his head aside. “But no matter about that,” he added. “It's over now, it is.”
Ralph drew out of his pocket the paper that had fallen from his father's breast.
“Is this what you mean?” he said, handing it to Sim.
Sim carried it to the light to read it. Returning to where Ralph sat, he cried in a shrill voice,—
“Then he had come back to do it. O God, why should it be murder to kill a scoundrel?”
“Did you know nothing of this until now?”