"Why? Tell me why, sir!"

Dyck looked closely, firmly, at the old servant and friend. Should he
tell the truth--that Boyne had tried to induce him to sell himself to the
French, to invoke his aid against the English government, to share in
treason? If he could have told it to anybody, he would have done so to
Michael; but if it was true that in his drunken blindness he had killed
Boyne, he would not seek to escape by proving Boyne a traitor.

He believed Boyne was a servant of the French; but unless the facts came
out in the trial, they should not have sure origin in himself. He would
not add to his crime in killing the father of the only girl who had ever
touched his heart, the shame of proving that father to be one who should
have been shot as a traitor.

He had courage and daring, but not sufficient to carry him through that
dark chapter. He would not try to save himself by turning public opinion
against Erris Boyne. The man had been killed by some one, perhaps--and
the thing ached in his heart--by himself; but that was no reason why the
man's death should not be full punishment for all the wrong he had done.

Dyck had a foolish strain in him, after all. Romance was his deadly foe;
it made him do a stupid, if chivalrous, thing. Meanwhile he would warn
the government at once about the projected French naval raid.

"Michael," said Dyck, rising again, "see my father, but you're not to say
I didn't kill Boyne, for, to tell the truth, I don't know. My head"--
he put his hand to it with a gesture of despair--"my head's a mass of
contradictions. It seems a thousand years since I entered that tavern!
I can't get myself level with all that's happened. That Erris Boyne