e quiet downs, where no sound could
startle her, and no spectacle flutter her, until the sea-breezes had
brought back her usual tone of health.

How long this promised restoration was in coming! Phebe, who watched for
it anxiously, saw but little sign of it. Felicita was more silent than
ever, more withdrawn into herself, gazing for hours upon the changeful
surface of the sea with absent eyes, through which the brain was not
looking out. Neither sound nor sight reached the absorbed soul, that was
wandering through some intricate mazes to which Phebe had no clue. But
no color came to Felicita's pale face, and no light into her dim eyes.
There was a painful and weird feeling often in Phebe's heart that
Felicita herself was not there; only the fair, frail form, which was as
insensible as a corpse, until this spirit came back to it. At such times
Phebe was impelled to touch her, and speak to her, and call her back
again, though it might be to irritability and displeasure.

"Phebe," said Felicita, one day when they sat on the cliff, so near the
edge that nothing but the sea lay within the range of their sight, "how
should you feel if, instead of helping a fellow-creature to save himself
from drowning, you had thrust him back into the water, and left him,
sure that he would perish?"

"But I cannot tell you how I should feel," answered Phebe, "because I
could never do it. It makes me shudder to think of such a thing. No
human being could do it."

"But if you had thrust the one fellow-creature nearest to you, the one
who loved you the most," pursued Felicita, "into sin, down into a deeper
gulf than he could have fallen into but for you--"

"My dear, my dear!" cried Phebe, interrupting her in a tone of the
tenderest pity. "Oh! I know now what is preying upon you. Because Felix
loves Alice it has brought back all the sorrowful past to you, and you
are letting it kill you. Listen! Let me speak this once, and then I will
never speak again, if you wish it. Canon Pascal knows it all; I told
him. And Felix knows it, and he loves you more than ever; you are dearer
to him a hundred times than you were before. And he forgives his
father--fully. God has cast his sin as a stone into the depths of the
sea, to be remembered against him no more forever!"

A slight flush crept over Felicita's pale face. It was a relief to her
to learn that Canon Pascal and Felix knew so much of the truth. The
darker secret must be hidden still in the dep