disinheriting him. He had let him die; he had effectually and beyond
redemption cut his own throat. Doubtless, too, Bellamy had taken the
new will with him; there was no chance of his being able to destroy
it.

By degrees, however, his fit of brooding gave way to one of sullen
fury against his wife, himself, but most of all against his dead
father. Drunk with excitement, rage, and baffled avarice, he seized
and candle and staggered up to the room where the corpse had been
laid, launching imprecations as he went at his dead father's head. But
when he came face to face with that dread Presence his passion died,
and a cold sense of the awful quiet and omnipotence of death came upon
him and chilled him into fear. In some indistinct way he realized how
impotent is the chafing of the waters of Mortality against the iron-
bound coasts of Death. To what purpose did he rail against that solemn
quiet thing, that husk and mask of life which lay in unmoved mockery
of his reviling?

His father was dead, and he, even he, had killed his father. He was
his father's murderer. And then a terror of the reckoning that must
one day be struck between that dead man's spirit and his own took
possession of him, and a foreknowledge of the awful shadow under which
he must henceforth live crept into his mind and froze the very marrow
in his bones. He looked again at the face, and, to his excited
imagination, it appeared to have assumed a sardonic smile. The curse
of Cain fell upon him as he looked, and weighed him down; his hair
rose, and the cold sweat poured from his forehead. At length he could
bear it no longer, but, turning, fled out of the room and out of the
house, far into the night.