ll darkness of the November night he had
watched the house which held Felicita and their children, his pain had
been less poignant than now, within these walls, where all his happy
life had been passed. He was unconscious of everything but his pain. He
could not hear Phebe's voice speaking for him to Mr. Clifford. He saw
and felt nothing, until a gentle and trembling hand pressing on his
shoulder feebly and as tenderly as his mother's made him look up into
the gray and agitated face of Mr. Clifford bending over him.

"Roland! Roland!" he said, in a voice broken by sobs, "my old friend's
son, forgive me as I forgive you. God be thanked, you have come back
again in time for me to see you and bid you welcome. I bless God with
all my heart. It is your own home, Roland, your own home."

With his feeble but eager old hands he drew him to the hearth, and
placed him in the chair close beside his own, where Phebe had been
sitting, and kept his hand upon his arm, lest he should vanish out of
his sight.

"You shall tell me nothing more to-night," he said; "I am old, and this
is enough for me. It is enough that to-night you and I have pardoned
one another from 'the low depths of our hearts.' Tell me nothing else
to-night."

Phebe had slipped away from them to help Mrs. Nixey to prepare a room
for Jean Merle. It was the one that had been Roland Sefton's nursery,
and the nursery of his children, and it was still occupied by Felix,
when he visited his old home. The homely hospitable occupation was a
relief to her; but in the room that she had left the two men sat side by
side in unbroken silence.

CHAPTER XX.

AS A HIRED SERVANT.

From a profound and dreamless sleep Jean Merle awoke early the next
morning, with the blessed feeling of being at home again in his
father's house. The heavy cross-beams of black oak dividing the ceiling
into panels; the low broad lattice window with a few upper panes of old
stained glass; the faded familiar pictures on the wall; these all awoke
in him memories of his earliest years. In the corner of the room, hardly
to be distinguished from the wainscot, was the high narrow door
communicating with his mother's chamber, through which he had often, how
often! seen her come in softly, on tiptoe, to take a look at him. His
own children, too, had slept there; and it was here that he had last
seen his little son and daughter before fleeing from his home a
self-accused criminal. All the happy, pro