You may easily guess what my answer was to this question.  When I pondered on the situation, I no longer found Captain Falconer a hard man to hate.  The very lightness of his purpose, contrasted with the heaviness of its consequences, aggravated his crime.  To risk so much upon other people, to gain so little for himself, was the more heinous sin than its converse would have been.  That he might not have foreseen the evil consequences made possible, was no palliation:  he ought to have examined the situation; or indeed he ought to have heeded what he must have known, that little offences may always entail dire evils.  Measured by their possibility to work havoc with lives, there are no small sins.  The man who enters carelessly upon a trivial deviation is therefore as much to be held responsible as he that walks deliberately into the blackest crime.  Not to know this, is not to have studied life; and not to have studied life is, in a person of mature years, a mighty sin of omission, because of the great evils that may arise from ignorance.  But Captain Falconer must have known life, must have seen the hazards of his course.  Therefore he was responsible in any view; and therefore I would do my utmost toward exacting payment from him.  Plainly, in Philip’s absence, the right fell to me, as his friend and Tom’s—­nay, too, as the provisionally accepted husband of Mr. Faringfield’s second daughter.

But before I got an opportunity to make a quarrel with Falconer (who had moved his quarters from the Faringfield house, wherein he had not slept or eaten since the night of Margaret’s leaving it, though he had spent some time in his rooms there on the ensuing day) I had a curious interview with Mr. Faringfield.

While in the town one day, I had stopped as usual to see my mother.  Just as I was about to remount my horse, Mr. Faringfield appeared at his garden gate.  Beckoning me to him, he led the way into the garden, and did not stop until we were behind a fir-tree, where we could not be seen from the house.

“Tell me the truth,” said he abruptly, his eyes fixed piercingly upon mine, “how Tom met his death.”

After a moment’s confusion, I answered: 

“I can add nothing to what has been told you, sir.”

He looked at me awhile in silence; then said, with a sorrowful frown: 

“I make no doubt you are tongue-tied by a compact.  But you need not fear me.  The British authorities are not to be moved by any complaint of mine.  My object is not to procure satisfaction for my son’s death.  I merely wish to know whether he took it upon himself to revenge our calamities; and whether that was not the true cause of his death.”

“Why, sir,” I said awkwardly, as he still held me in a searching gaze that seemed to make speech imperative, “how should you think that?”

“From several things.  In the first place, I know Tom was a lad of mettle.  The account of the supposed attack that night, has it that Falconer was in your party; he was one of those who returned with you.  What would Tom have been doing in Falconer’s society, when not under orders, after what had occurred?  Other people, who know nothing of that occurrence, would see nothing strange in their being together.  But I would swear the boy was not so lost to honourable feeling as to have been Falconer’s companion after what had taken place here.”