Nine years later.  Convicts pulling down the old walls of Portsmouth.  An officer’s funeral passes by.  No. 62—­Henry—­overhears people speaking of the manner of the officer’s death, and his name, Major Everard.  Tears fall on the convict’s hands as he works.  No. 62’s father is port admiral.  Alma’s perjury in court had revealed all to Henry, and reduced him to apathetic despair.  “There is no God—­no good anywhere!” he cried.  But in time Lilian’s periodic letters gave him heart and hope, and he had accepted his fate bravely, trying to lift up and cheer his fellow-prisoners.  In the darkness and uproar of a thunderstorm he escapes from the guarded works.  His adventures, during which he comes accidentally and unrecognized in contact with his brother’s widow, his sister, and her children, who prattle of family matters in his hearing, and, after a few weeks’ wandering, by his being recaptured while lying on the roadside unconscious from hunger and exhaustion.  This part of the story concludes with the reception of this news by Lilian and Cyril, whose unintentional neglect has caused the miscarriage of a letter that would have enabled Henry to escape.

IV.—­“I Will Confess my Wickedness"

Everard is free, and, wearing the grey suit of a discharged prisoner, is travelling from Dartmoor to London by train.  Marion, his brother, Leslie, Mrs. Maitland, and the admiral are all dead.  Everything is strange and changed to him.  Liberty is sweet and bitter.  He is prematurely aged and broken down; the great future that had been before him is now for ever impossible.  His still undeveloped scientific theories and discoveries have been anticipated by others.  He feels the prison taint upon him; he will not see Lilian until it is removed, and he has become accustomed to the bewilderment of freedom.

After a few days’ pause he starts from London for Malbourne, stopping at Belminster, through which he had made his last free journey with Cyril, when he told him that “an ascetic is a rake turned monk.”  Passing the gaol in which he had suffered so much, he goes to the cathedral.  He asks who is now Dean of Belminster.

The verger is surprised.  “Where have you been, sir, not to have heard of the celebrated Dean Maitland?” The great dean!  The books he has written, the things he has done!  All the world knows Dean Maitland, the greatest preacher in the Church of England.

The deanery interior.  Cyril, charming and adored as ever, is considering whether he shall accept the historic bishopric of Warham.  A strange youth from America is announced, and asks the dean to give him a university education—­“because I am your son.”  “Since when,” returns the dean tranquilly, “have you been suffering from this distressing illusion?” The youth bears a letter from Alma.  She is dying in Belminster, and implores him to come to her.  She cannot die, she writes, till she has cleared Everard.  After this terrible scene Cyril is in agony, and nearly commits suicide.  “But one sin in a life so spotless!” he moans.  The same evening Everard, overwhelmed with accounts of Cyril’s good deeds and spiritual counsels, and examining with mingled awe and pity the numerous books he has written, goes to hear one of the Anglican Chrysostom’s lectures to working men in the cathedral.