"Yes, but they were ignorant, simple men," replied Mr. Clifford, "they need never have known of his crime. All their money could have been replaced without their knowledge; it was of me Roland was afraid. If the time could come over again--and I go over and over it in my own mind all in vain--I would act altogether differently. I would make him feel to the utmost the sin and peril of his course; but I would keep his secret. Even Felicita should know nothing. It was partly my fault too. If I had fulfilled my duty, and looked after my affairs instead of dreaming my time away in Italy, your father, as the junior partner, could not have fallen into this snare. When a crime is committed the criminal is not the only one to be blamed. Consciously or unconsciously those about him have been helping by their own carelessness and indolence, by cowardice, by indifference to right and wrong. By a thousand subtle influences we help our brother to disobey God; and when he is found out we stand aloof and raise an outcry against him. God has made every one of us his brother's keeper." "Then you too have forgiven him," said Felix, with a glowing sense of comfort in his heart. "Forgiven him? ay!" he answered, "as he sits by me at the fireside, invisible to all but me, I say to him again and again in words inaudible to all but him: 'Even as I hope for pardon in that day, When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits, So be thou pardoned.'" The tremulous, weak old voice paused, and the withered hands lay feebly on his knees as he looked out on the summer sky, seeing nothing of its brightness, for the thoughts and memories that were flocking to his brain. Felix's younger eyes caught every familiar object on which the sun was shining, and knitted them up for ever with the memory of that hour. "God help me!" he cried, "I forgive my father too; but I have lost him. I never knew the real man." CHAPTER VIII. THE GRAVE AT ENGELBERG.