"Cousin Felicita must have loved him with her whole heart," sighed Alice, "yet if I were in her place, I should come here often; it would be the one place I loved to come to. She is a hard woman, father; hard, and bitter, and obstinate. Do you think Felix's father would have set himself against me as she has done?" She turned to him, her sad and pensive face, almost the dearest face in the world to him; and he gazed into it with penetrating and loving eyes. Would it not be best to tell the child the secret this grave covered, here, by the grave itself? Better for her to know the truth concerning the dead, than cherish hard and unjust thoughts of the living. Even if Felicita consented, he could not let her marry Felix ignorant of the facts which Phebe had disclosed to him. Felix himself must know them some day; and was not this the hour and the place for revealing them to Alice? "My darling," he said, "I know why Felicita never comes here, nor lets her children come; and also why she is at present opposed to the thought of Felix marrying. Roland Sefton, her husband, the unhappy man whose body lies here, was guilty of a crime; and died miserably while a fugitive from our country. His death consigned the crime to oblivion; no one remembered it against her and her children. But if he had lived he would have been a convict; and she, and Felix, and Hilda would have shared his ignominy. She feels that she must not suffer Felix to enter our family until she has told me this; and it is the mere thought and dread of such a disclosure that has made her ill. We must wait till her mind recovers its strength." "What was it he had done?" asked Alice, with quivering lips. "He had misappropriated a number of securities left in his charge," answered Canon Pascal, "Phebe says to the amount of over L10,000; most of it belonging to Mr. Clifford." "Is that all?" cried Alice, the color rushing back again to her face, and the light to her eyes, "was it only money? Oh! I thought it was more dreadful than that. Why! we should never blame cousin Felicita because her husband misappropriated some securities belonging to old Mr. Clifford. And Felix is not to blame at all; how could he be? Poor Felix!" "But, Alice," he said, with a half smile, "if, instead of being buried here, Roland Sefton had lived, and been arrested, and sent to a convict prison for a term of imprisonment, Felicita's life, and the life of her children, would have been altogether overshadowed by the disgrace and infamy of it. There could have been no love between you and Felix." "It was a good thing that he died," she answered, looking down on the grave again almost gladly. "Does Felix know this? But I am sure he does not," she added quickly, and looking up with a heightened color into her father's face, "he is all honor, and truth, and unselfishness. He could not be guilty of a crime against any one."