And I think it like enough that you, who have read it all in the order in which I have written it, may long since have guessed that thing which had puzzled me so much--Torode's strange sparing of my life when he murdered all my comrades.
But to me, who had never known anything of my father, and had grown to know myself only as Phil Carre, the whole matter was amazing, and upsetting beyond my power to tell.
"And what are we to do now, Uncle George ?" I asked dispiritedly, for the sudden tumbling into one's life of a father whom all honest men must hate and loathe darkened all my sky like a thunder-cloud on a summer day.
"If he dies we will bury him here and in our three hearts, and no other must know.

It would only break your mother's life again as it was broken once before." "And if he lives ?" I asked gloomily, and, unseemly though it might be, it was perhaps hardly strange that I could not bring myself to wish anything but that he might die.
"If he lives," said Uncle George, no whit less gloomily--and stopped in the slough....

"I do not know....

His life is forfeit ...

and yet--you cannot give him up ...