Then the thought of his task arose in his mind, and it bathed him in a sweat of horror.

Over in France he had allowed himself to be persuaded, and had pledged himself to do this thing.

Everard, the relentless, unforgiving fanatic of vengeance, had--as we have seen--trained him to believe that the avenging of his mother's wrongs was the only thing that could justify his own existence.

Besides, it had all seemed remote then, and easy as remote things are apt to seem.

But now--now that he had met in the flesh this man who was his father--his hesitation was turned to very horror.
It was not that he did not conceive, in spite of his odd ideas upon temperament and its responsibilities, that his mother's' wrongs cried out for vengeance, and that the avenging of them would be a righteous, fitting deed; but it was that he conceived that his own was not the hand to do the work of the executioner upon one who--after all--was still his own father.