David Windom clambered out, leaving his lantern below. Letting the dead man's body slide into the crevice, he followed, bent on at least partially finishing the job. When he climbed out a second time, Edward Crown was at the bottom of the hole and the wet, foul leaves again hid the opening. Tomorrow night, and the night after, he would come again to close the hole entirely with earth and stones, hiding forever the grewsome thing in Quill's "chimney," as the flue-like passage was called.
Extinguishing the lantern, he started down the hill at a reckless, break-neck speed. He had the uncanny feeling that he was being followed, that Edward Crown was dogging his footsteps. Halfway down, he stumbled and fell sprawling. As he started to rise, a sound smote his ears—the sound of footsteps. For many seconds he held his breath, terror clutching his throat. He WAS being followed! Some one was shuffling down the rock behind him. The collie! He had forgotten the dog. But even as he drew in the deep breath of relief, he felt his blood suddenly freeze in his veins. It was not the dog. Something approached that moaned and whimpered and was not mortal. It passed by him as he crouched to the earth—a shadow blacker than the night itself. Suddenly the truth burst upon him.
"My God! Alix!"
Half an hour later he staggered into his house, bearing the form of his daughter—tenderly, carefully, not as he had borne the despised dead.
She had followed him to the top of Quill's Window, she had witnessed the ghastly interment, and she had whispered a prayer for the boy who was gone.
The next day her baby was born and that night she died. Coming out of a stupor just before death claimed her, she said to David Windom:
"I am going to Edward. I do not forgive you, father. You must not ask that of me. You say it is my duty to save you from the gallows—a child's duty to her parent. I have promised. I shall keep my promise. It is not in my heart to send you to the gallows. You are my father. You have always loved me. This is my baby—mine and Edward's. She may live—God knows I wish I might have died yesterday and spared her the accursed breath of life—she may grow up to be a woman, just as I grew up. I do not ask much of you in return for what I have done for you, father. You have killed my Edward. I loved him with all my soul. I do not care to live. But my child must go on living, I suppose. My child and his. She is his daughter. I cannot expect you to love her, but I do expect you to take care of her. You say that blood is thicker than water. You are right. I cannot find it in my heart to betray you. You may tell the world whatever story you like about Edward. He is dead, and I shall soon be dead. You can hurt neither of us, no matter what you do. I ask two things of you. One is that you will be good to my baby as long as you may live, and the other is that you will bury me up there where you put Edward last night. I must lie near him always. Say to people that I have asked you to bury me in that pit at the top of Quill's Window—that it was my whim, if you like. Close it up after you have placed me there and cover it with great rocks, so that Edward and I may never be disturbed. I want no headstone, no epitaph. Just the stones as they were hewn by God."
David Windom promised. He was alone in the room with her when she died.
IV—Twenty years passed. Windom came at last to the end of his days. He had fulfilled his promises to Alix. He had taken good care of her daughter, he had given her everything in his power to give, and he had worshipped her because she was like both of the Alixes he had loved. She was Alix Crown—Alix the Third, he called her.
On the day of his death, Windom confessed the crime of that far off night in March. In the presence of his lawyer, his doctor, his granddaughter and the prosecuting attorney of the county, he revealed the secret he had kept for a score of years. The mystery of Edward Crown's disappearance was cleared up, and for the first time in her young life Alix was shorn of the romantic notion that one day her missing father would appear in the flesh, out of the silences, to claim her as his own. From earliest childhood, her imagination had dealt with all manner of dramatic situations; she had existed in the glamour of uncertainty; she had looked upon herself as a character worthy of a place in some gripping tale of romance. The mound of rocks on the crest of Quill's Window, surrounded by a tall iron paling fence with its padlocked gate, covered only the body of the mother she had never seen. She did not know until this enlightening hour that her father was also there and had been throughout all the years in which fancy played so important a part.
Like all the rest of the world, she was given to understand that her father had cruelly abandoned her mother. In her soul she had always cherished the hope that this heartless monster might one day stand before her, pleading and penitent, only to be turned away with the scorn he so richly deserved. She even pictured him as rich and powerful, possessed of everything except the one great boon which she alone could give him—a daughter's love. And she would point to the top of Quill's Window and tell him that he must first look there for forgiveness—under the rocks where his broken-hearted victim slept.
The truth stunned her. She was a long time in realizing that her grandfather, whom she both loved and feared—this grim, adoring old giant—not only had murdered her father but undoubtedly had killed her mother as well. The story that David Windom had written out and signed at the certain approach of death, read aloud in his presence by the shocked and incredulous lawyer, and afterwards printed word for word in the newspapers at the old man's command, changed the whole course of life for her. In fact, her nature underwent a sharp but subtle change. There was nothing left to her of the old life, no thought, no purpose, no fancy; all had been swept up in a heap and destroyed in the short space of half an hour. Everything in her life had to be reconstructed, made-over to suit the new order. She could no longer harbour vengeful thoughts concerning her father, she could no longer charge him with the wanton destruction of her mother's happiness.
The grandfather she had loved all her life assumed another shape entirely; he was no longer the same, and never again could be the same. She did not hate him. That was impossible. She had never seen her parents, so she had not known the love of either. They did not belong in her life except through the sheerest imagination. Her grandfather was the only real thing she had had in life, and she had adored him. He had killed two people who were as nothing to her, but he had taken the place of both. How could she bring herself to hate this man who had destroyed what were no more than names to her? Father—Mother! Two words—that was all. And for twenty long years he had been paying—Oh, how he must have paid!
She recalled his reason for taking her to England when she was less than eight years old and leaving her there until she was twelve. She remembered that he had said he wanted her to be like her grandmother, to grow up among her people, to absorb from them all that had made the first Alix so strong and fine and true. And then he had come to take her from them, back to the land of her birth, because, he said, he wanted her to be like her mother, the second Alix—an American woman. She recalled his bitter antipathy to co-educational institutions and his unyielding resolve that she should complete her schooling in a Sacred Heart Convent. She remembered the commotion this decision created among his neighbours. In her presence they had assailed him with the charge that he was turning the girl over, body and soul, to the Catholic Church, and he had uttered in reply the never to be forgotten words:
"If I never do anything worse than that for her, I'll be damned well satisfied with my chance of getting into heaven as soon as the rest of you."
When David's will was read, it was found that except for a few small bequests, his entire estate, real and personal, was left to his granddaughter, Alix Crown, to have and to hold in perpetuity without condition or restriction of any sort or character.
The first thing she did was to have a strong picket fence constructed around the base of the hill leading up to Quill's Window, shutting off all accessible avenues of approach to the summit. Following close upon the publication of David Windom's confession, large numbers of people were urged by morbid curiosity to visit the strange burial-place of Edward and Alix Crown. The top of Quill's Window became