ft skill of a nurse. Felix is as tender-hearted, but he would
not make a show of it so openly."

"Cousin Felicita must have loved him with her whole heart," sighed
Alice, "yet if I were in her place, I should come here often; it would
be the one place I loved to come to. She is a hard woman, father; hard,
and bitter, and obstinate. Do you think Felix's father would have set
himself against me as she has done?"

She turned to him, her sad and pensive face, almost the dearest face in
the world to him; and he gazed into it with penetrating and loving eyes.
Would it not be best to tell the child the secret this grave covered,
here, by the grave itself? Better for her to know the truth concerning
the dead, than cherish hard and unjust thoughts of the living. Even if
Felicita consented, he could not let her marry Felix ignorant of the
facts which Phebe had disclosed to him. Felix himself must know them
some day; and was not this the hour and the place for revealing them to
Alice?

"My darling," he said, "I know why Felicita never comes here, nor lets
her children come; and also why she is at present opposed to the thought
of Felix marrying. Roland Sefton, her husband, the unhappy man whose
body lies here, was guilty of a crime; and died miserably while a
fugitive from our country. His death consigned the crime to oblivion; no
one remembered it against her and her children. But if he had lived he
would have been a convict; and she, and Felix, and Hilda would have
shared his ignominy. She feels that she must not suffer Felix to enter
our family until she has told me this; and it is the mere thought and
dread of such a disclosure that has made her ill. We must wait till her
mind recovers its strength."

"What was it he had done?" asked Alice, with quivering lips.

"He had misappropriated a number of securities left in his charge,"
answered Canon Pascal, "Phebe says to the amount of over L10,000; most
of it belonging to Mr. Clifford."

"Is that all?" cried Alice, the color rushing back again to her face,
and the light to her eyes, "was it only money? Oh! I thought it was more
dreadful than that. Why! we should never blame cousin Felicita because
her husband misappropriated some securities belonging to old Mr.
Clifford. And Felix is not to blame at all; how could he be? Poor
Felix!"

"But, Alice," he said, with a half smile, "if, instead of being buried
here, Roland Sefton had lived, and been arrested, and sent to a convic