"It is like Aunt Hannah's voice calling to me. I am glad I came, though I suppose father will scold," he said, as he paused a moment to rest, and then rapidly descended the knoll to the house.
Entering by the wood-shed door, which was first reached, he went into the summer kitchen, and passed on into the second kitchen, where a candle was burning dimly, and where he stopped a moment by the warm stove. No one heard him, no one knew he was there; but as he stood in the silence and darkness he heard distinctly his grandfather's voice, and this was what he heard: "I must tell you, my son, and you, my minister; but no one else, not Grey--no, no, not, the boy Grey, who loves me so much. His life must not be shadowed with disgrace. He must not hate me in my coffin. Oh, Grey! Grey! May God bless him and give him every needful happiness, and make him so good and noble that his life will blot out the stain upon our name."
Here Grey, who stood motionless, heard his father say: "For pity's sake tell me what you mean; the suspense is terrible."
And then came the awful response, which sounded through the silent room like the knell to all the boy's future happiness and peace of mind.
"Thirty-one years ago to-night, in the heat of passion I killed a man in the kitchen yonder, and buried him under this floor, under my bed, and I have slept on his grave ever since!"
No wonder Grey's face grew white as the face of a corpse, while his heart throbbed with unutterable pain as he whispered the word his father had said aloud.
His grandfather, whom he had thought so good, and loved so much, a murderer! He had killed a man in that very room, perhaps on the spot where the boy was standing, and Grey recoiled from the place, and looked down upon the floor, which gave no sign of the tragedy enacted there thirty-one years ago, and kept hidden ever since.
Like a flash of lightning Grey saw all the past, and understood now what had been singular in his grandfather's manner and in his Aunt Hannah's, too; for she had been privy to the deed, and had helped to keep it from the world, and to Grey this was the bitterest thought of all, the one which made him sick, and faint and dizzy, as he groped his way to the door, which he opened and closed cautiously, and then fell heavily upon his face in the snow, with all consciousness for the moment blotted out.