He walked up to her, trying apparently to carry things off with a high air, but he was not strong enough, or hardened enough. At sight of my sister sitting there, for she had sank down at last, with a face like a corpse, only it had not the peace of the dead, Francis trembled. . "Forgive me, if I have done you any harm. It was all the result of circumstances. Perhaps, if you had been a little less rigid--had scolded me less and studied me more.--But you could not help your nature, nor I mine. Good-bye, Penelope." She sat, impassive; even when with a sort of involuntary tenderness, he seized and kissed her hand; but the instant he was gone--fairly gone--with the door shut upon him and his horse clattering down the road--I heard it plainly--Penelope started up with a cry of "Francis--Francis!"--O the anguish of it!--I can hear it now. But it was not this Francis she called after--I was sure of that--I saw it in her eyes. It was the Francis of ten years ago--the Francis she had loved--now as utterly dead and buried, as if she had seen the stone laid over him, and his body left to sleep in the grave. Dead and buried--dead and buried. Do you know, I sometimes wish it were so; that she had been left, peacefully widowed--knowing his soul was safe with God. I thought, when papa and I--papa who that night kissed me, for the first time since one night you know--sat by Penelope's bed, watching her--"If Francis had only died!" After she was quiet, and I had persuaded papa to go to rest, he sent for me and desired me to read a psalm, as I used to do when he was ill--you remember? When it was ended, he asked me, had I any idea what Francis had done that Penelope could not pardon? I told him, difficult and painful as it was to do it, all I suspected--indeed, felt sure of. For was it not the truth?--the only answer I could give. For the same reason I write of these terrible things to you without any false delicacy--they are the truth, and they must be told. Papa lay for some time, thinking deeply. At last he said:-- "My dear, you are no longer a child, and I may speak to you plainly. I am an old man, and your mother is dead. I wish she were with us now, she might help us: for she was a good woman, Dora. Do you think--take time to consider the question--that your sister is acting right?" I said, "quite right." "Yet, I thought you held that doctrine, 'the greater the sinner the greater the saint;' and believed every crime a man can commit may be repented, atoned, and pardoned?" "Yes, father; but Francis has never either repented or atoned."