" Another little item he suppressed: that he found the
purse at the bottom of the skiff, after he got out of the mill, and
appropriated it to himself; and when he had fairly done that, he grew
more afraid of having done it than of all the rest. The money he
secreted, using it when he dared, a sixpence at a time; the case, with
its papers, he buried in the spot where his master afterwards found it.
With all this upon the young man's conscience, no wonder he was a little
confused and contradictory in his statements to Pike: no wonder he
fancied the ghost of the man he could have saved and did not, might now
and then be hovering about him. Pike learned the real truth at last; and
a compunction had come over him, now that he was dying, for having
doubted Lord Hartledon.
"My lord, I can only ask you to forgive me. I ought to have known you
better. But things seemed to corroborate it so: I've heard people say the
new lord was as a man who had some great care upon him. Oh, I was a
fool!"
"At any rate it was not _that_ care, Pike; I would have saved my
brother's life with my own, had I been at hand to do it. As to
Ripper--I shall never bear to look upon him again."
"He's gone away," said Pike.
"Where has he gone?"
"The miller turned him off for idleness, and he's gone away, nobody knows
where, to get work: I don't suppose he'll ever come back again.
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