"He was always kind and tender toward all women," answered Phebe. "All the Seftons have been like that; they could never be harsh to any woman. But your father almost worshipped the ground your mother trod upon; nothing on earth was good enough for her. Look here, my dear boy, I've been trying to paint a picture for you." She lifted up a stretcher which had been turned with the canvas to the wall, and placed it on her easel in the full light of a shaded lamp. For a moment she stood between him and it, gazing at it with tears in her blue eyes. Then she fell back to his side to look at it with him, clasping his hand in hers, and holding it in a warm, fond grasp. It was a portrait of Roland Sefton, painted from her faithful memory, which had been aided by a photograph taken when he was the same age Felix was now. Phebe could only see it dimly through her tears, and for a moment or two both of them were silent. "My father?" said Felix, his face flushing and his voice faltering; "is it like him, Phebe? Yes, yes! I recollect him now; only he looked happier or merrier than he does there. There is something sad about his face that I do not remember. What a king he was among men! I'm not worthy to be the son of such a man and such a woman." "No, no; don't say that," she answered eagerly; "you're not as handsome, or as strong, or as clever as he was; but you may be as good a man--yes, a better man." She spoke with a deep, low sigh that was almost a sob, as the memory of how she had seen him last--crushed under a weight of sin and flying from the penalty of crime--flashed across her brain. She knew now why there 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."