ad learned
to look up to him as the paragon of all perfection, until now, as a girl
on the verge of womanhood, she had offered up to him a very pure and
maidenly worship. There was no one else whom she could love as much; for
her dumb and deaf father she loved in quite a different manner--with
more of pity and compassion than of admiration. Roland too had sometimes
talked with her, especially while she was a child, about God and Christ;
and she had regarded him as a spiritual director. Now her guide was lost
in the dense darkness. There was no sure example for her to follow.

She had told her father he would never see her smile again if Roland
Sefton was taken to jail. There had been, of course, an implied promise
in this, but the promise was broken. Old Marlowe looked in vain for the
sweet and merry smiles that had been used to play upon her face. She was
too young and too unversed in human nature to know how jealously her
father would watch her, with inward curses on him who had wrought the
change. When he saw her stand for an hour or more, listlessly gazing
with troubled, absent eyes across the wide-spreading moor, with its
broad sweep of deep-purpled bloom, and golden gorse, and rich green
fern, yet taking no notice, nor hastening to fix the gorgeous hues upon
her canvas while the summer lasted; and when he watched her in the long
dusk of the autumn evenings sit motionless in the chimney corner
opposite to him, her fingers lying idly on her lap instead of busily
prattling some merry nonsense to him, and with a sad preoccupation in
her girlish face; then he felt that he had received his own death-blow,
and had no more to live for.

The loss of his hard-earned money had taken a deeper hold upon him than
a girl so young as Phebe could imagine. For what is money to a young
nature but the merest dross, compared with the love and faith it has
lavished upon some fellow-mortal? While she was mourning over the
shipwreck of all her best affections, old Marlowe was brooding over his
six hundred pounds. They represented so much to him, so many years of
toil and austere self-denial. He had risen early, and late taken rest,
and eaten the bread of carefulness. His grief was not all ignoble, for
it was for his girl he grieved most; his wonderful child, so much more
gifted than the children of other men, whom nature had treated more
kindly than himself, men who could hear and speak, but whose daughters
were only commonplace creatur