e
had lurked a subtle sadness in the face she had been painting, which she
had not been able to banish.

"I think," she said, as if speaking to herself, "that the sense of sin
links us to God almost as closely as love does. I never understood Jesus
Christ until I knew something of the wickedness of the world, and the
frailty of our nature at its best. It is when a good man has to cry,
'Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy
sight,' that we feel something of the awful sinfulness of sin."

"And have you this sense of sin, Phebe?" asked Felix in a low voice. "I
have thought sometimes that you, and my mother, and men like my father
and Mr. Pascal, felt but little of the inward strength of sin. Your
lives stand out so clear and true. If there is a stain upon them it is
so slight, so plainly a defect of the physical nature, that it often
seems to me you do not know what evil is."

"We all know it," she answered, "and that shadow of sorrow you see in
your father's face must bear witness for him to you that he has passed
through the same conflict you may be fighting. The sins of good men are
greater than the sins of bad men. One lie from a truthful man is more
hurtful than all the lies of a liar. The sins of a man after God's own
heart have done more harm than all the crimes of all the Pagan
emperors."

"It is true," he said thoughtfully.

"If I told you a falsehood, what would you think of me?"

"I believe it would almost break my heart if you or my mother told me a
falsehood," he answered.

"I could not paint this portrait while your grandmother was living,"
said Phebe, after a short silence; "I tried it once or twice, but I
could never succeed. See; here is the photograph your father gave me
when I was quite a little girl, because I cried so bitterly at his going
away for a few months on his wedding trip. There were only two taken,
and your mother has the other. They were both very young; he was only
your age, and your mother was not twenty. But Lord Riversford was dead,
and she was not happy with her cousins; and your grandfather, who was
living then, was eager for the match. Everybody said it was a great
match for your father."

"They were very happy; they were not too young to be married," answered
Felix, with a deep flush on his handsome face. "Why should not people
marry young, if they love one another?"

"I would ask Canon Pascal that question if I were you," she said,
smiling sig