"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.

The chill, however, and the damp revived him almost immediately, and
struggling to his feet he started on his route back to Grey's Park along
the same road he had come, seeing nothing, bearing nothing but that one
word, that name his father had given to his grandfather, and which he,
too, had echoed. Over and over again the winds repeated it until the,
woods seemed full of it, and he said to himself:

"Will it always be so? Shall I never hear anything but that again so