inifred and I had both heard. My sole
thought was for Winifred. She had read the curse; but where was the
dead body of her father that would proclaim upon whose head the curse
had fallen? I stared around me in dismay. She saw how deeply I was
disturbed, but little dreamed the true cause.

'Oh, Henry,' said she, 'to think that you should have such a grief as
this; your dear father's tomb violated!' and she sat down and sobbed.
'But there is a God in heaven,' she added, rising with great
solemnity. 'Whoever has committed this dreadful crime against God and
man will rue the day he was born:--the curse of a dead man who has
been really wronged no penance or prayer can cure,--so my aunt in
Wales used to say, and so Sinfi says;--it clings to the wrongdoer and
to his children. That cry I heard was the voice of vengeance, and it
came from your father's tomb.'

'It is a most infamous robbery,' I said; 'but as to the curse, that
is of course as powerless to work mischief as the breath of a baby.'
And again I anxiously looked around to see where was the dead body of
Wynne, which I knew must be close by.

'Oh, Henry!' said she, 'listen to these words, these awful words of
your dead father, and the words of the Bible too.'

And she held up to her eyes, as though fascinated by it, the
parchment scroll, and read aloud in a voice so awe-struck that it did
not seem to be her voice at all:

'_He who shall violate this tomb,--he who shall steal this amulet,
hallowed as a love-token between me and my dead wife,--he who shall
dare to lay a sacrilegious hand upon this cross, stands cursed by
God, cursed by love, and cursed by me, Philip Aylwin, lying here.
"Let there be no man to pity him, nor to have compassion upon his
fatherless children....Let his children be vagabonds, and beg their
bread: let them seek it also out of desolate places."--Psalm cix.
So saith the Lord_. Amen.'

'I am in the toils,' I murmured, with grinding teeth.

'What a frightful curse!' she said, shuddering. 'It terrifies me to
think of it. How hard it seems,' she continued, 'that the children
should be cursed for the father's crimes.'

'But, Winifred, they are NOT so cursed,' I cried. 'It is all a
hideous superstition: one of Man's idiotic lies!'

'Henry,' said she, shocked at my irreverence, 'it _is_ so; the Bible
says it, and all life shows it. Ah! I wonder what wretch committed
the sacrilege, and why he had no pity on his poor innocent ch