He crossed with his candle to the opposite wall and held it up before another face:  a man full of red blood out to the skin; full-lipped, red-lipped; audacious about the forehead and brows, and beautiful over his thick careless hair through which a girl’s fingers seemed lately to have wandered.  He looked level out at his offspring as though he still stood throbbing on the earth and he spoke to him:  “I am not alive to speak to you with my voice, but I have spoken to you through my blood.  When the cup of life is filled, drain it deep.  Why does nature fill it if not to have you empty it?”

He blew his candle out in the eyes of that passionate face, and holding it in his hand, a smoking torch, walked slowly backward and forward in the darkness of the hall with only a little pale moonlight struggling in through a window here and there.

Then with a second impulse he went over and stood close to the dark image who had descended into him through the mysteries of nature.  “You,” he said, “who helped to make me what I am, you had the conscience and not the temptation.  And you,” he said, turning to the hidden face across the hall, “who helped to make me what I am, you had the temptation and not the conscience.  What does either of you know of me who had both?

“And what do I know about either of you,” he went on, taking up again the lonely vigil of his walk and questioning; “you who preached against the Scarlet Woman, how do I know you were not the scarlet man?  I may have derived both from you—­both conscience and sin—­without hypocrisy.  All those years during which your face was hardening, your one sincere prayer to God may have been that He would send you to your appointed place before you were found out by men on earth.  And you with your fresh red face, you may have lain down beside the wife of your youth, and have lived with her all your years, as chaste as she.”

He resumed his walk, back and forth, back and forth; and his thoughts changed: 

“What right have I to question them, or judge them, or bring them forward in my life as being responsible for my nature?  If I roll back the responsibility to them, had they not fathers? and had not their fathers fathers? and if a man rolls back his deeds upon those who are his past, then where will responsibility be found at all, and of what poor cowardly stuff is each of us?”

How silent the night was, how silent the great house!  Only his slow footsteps sounded there like the beating of a heavy heart resolved not to fail.

At last they died away from the front of the house, passing inward down a long hallway and growing more muffled; then the sound of them ceased altogether:  he stood noiselessly before his mother’s door.

He stood there, listening if he might hear in the intense stillness a sleeper’s breathing.  “Disappointed mother,” he said as silently as a spirit might speak to a spirit.

Then he came back and slowly began to mount the staircase.