"I see it all now; I see it all! While we are buoyed up with health and strength, we continue hard, selfish, obstinate in our wickedness. But when death comes, we awake to our error; and death has come to me, and I have awakened to mine. Why did I turn him out like a dog? He had neither kith nor kin, and I sent him adrift on the world, to fight with it or to starve! He was the only child of my sister, and she was gone. She and I were of the same father and mother; we shared the same meals in childhood, the same home, the same play, the same hopes. She wrote to me when she was dying, as I am dying now: 'Richard, should my poor boy be left fatherless--for my husband's health seems to be failing--be his friend and protector for Helen's sake, and may Heaven bless you for it!' And I scoffed at the injunction when the boy offended me, and turned him out. _Shall I have to answer for it?_"
The last anxious doubt was uttered more audibly than the rest; it escaped from his lips with a groan. A woman who was dozing over the fire started up.
"Go out and leave me," he repeated, with anger little fitted to his position. And the woman was speeding from the room, when he caught at the curtain and recalled her.
"Not yet, sir. But, with this heavy fall, it's not to be wondered at. The highways must be almost impassable. With good roads they might have been here hours ago."
She went out. He lay back on his pillow: his eyes wide open, but wearing the same dreamy look. You may be wondering who he is; though you probably guess, for you have heard of him once before as Mr. Cooper, the uncle who discarded Edgar Halliburton.
I must give you a few words of retrospect. Richard Cooper was the eldest of three children; the others were a brother and a sister: Richard, Alfred, and Helen. Alfred and Helen both married; Richard never did marry. It was somewhat singular that the brother and sister should both die, each leaving an orphan; and that the orphans should find a home in the house of their Uncle Richard. Julia Cooper, the brother's orphan, was the first to come to it, a long time before Edgar Halliburton came. Helen had married the Rev. William Halliburton, and she died at his rectory in Devonshire--sending that earnest prayer to her brother Richard which you have just heard him utter. A little while, and her husband, the rector, also died; and then it was that Edgar went up to his Uncle Richard's. Fortunate for these two orphan children, it appeared to be, that their uncle had not married and could give them a good home.