“My dear,” said the elder lady, “we are a family of misfortune.”
“But why—why—why?” asked the other. “What have we done?”
The elder lady shook her head. “Things are done,” she said, “that are never suspected. Nobody knows, nobody finds out, but the arm of the Lord is stretched out and vengeance falls, if not upon the guilty, then upon his children and his grandchildren unto the third and fourth generation. It has fallen heavily upon that old man—for the sins of his father, perhaps—and upon us—and upon the children——”
“The helpless, innocent children? Oh! It is cruel.”
“We have Scripture for it.”
These words—this conversation—came back suddenly and unexpectedly to the young man. He had never remembered them before.
“Who did what?” he asked. “The guilty person cannot be this venerable patriarch, because this affliction has fallen upon him and still abides with him after seventy years. But they spoke of something else. Why do these old words come back to me? Ancestor, sleep on.”
In the hall he saw the old housekeeper, and stopped to ask her after the master.
“He spoke just now,” he said.
“Spoke, sir? Spoke? The master spoke?”