"I thought as much--I hoped as much. He looks worthy of you, Griselda. Norah," he said, "this is your sister--your princess, as you call her; she will care for you. You will be a good little maid to her?" "Yes, father," Norah said; and then, with touching simplicity, she put her little hand into Griselda's, and, looking up at her, she saw tears were coursing each other down her cheeks. "Will you pray for me?" the dying man said. "Pray that I may be forgiven." "Pray for yourself, father," Griselda whispered. He heard the word fall from her lips; and, putting out his long, thin, wasted hand, he laid it on her head as she knelt by the bed, and said: "I pray to be forgiven, and for blessings on you." "For Christ's sake!" The voice was from Graves, who, in broken accents, called upon the Master whom she loved to have mercy on the poor penitent who lay dying. Then little Norah, nestling close to her father, repeated the 23rd Psalm; but before she had ended, her father became restless, and fumbled for the paper, and said: "The ring--the ring--her mother's ring!" Griselda put it into his feeble, uncertain grasp, and he murmured: "Put it on--put it on; and forgive me for all the misery I caused your mother. I broke her heart; and then the flames--the cruel flames--took from me the other poor child who loved me. My wife--Norah's mother--well, if she had lived, I should have broken her heart, too." After this there were no coherent words--all was confusion again; and before the Abbey clock had struck out eleven, the spirit had passed away. Who shall dare to limit the love and forgiveness of God in Christ? With this sad story of a misspent and miserable life we have no more to do here. It rolls back into the mists of oblivion with tens of thousands like it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in all the centuries since the world began. We dare not say such life-stories leave no trace behind, for true it is that the evil lives, when the doer of the evil is gone. The two daughters of this unhappy man were bearing the consequences of his sin. The child cast penniless on the cold world, the beautiful girl by her side suffering as only such a nature could suffer from the sense of humiliation and distress that her father had been a man whose very name must perish with him--for who would wish to keep it in remembrance? Oh for the good name which is better than riches to leave to our children! Surely, when troubled for the future of our sons and daughters, we may strive to leave them that which is better than silver and gold--the inheritance of a good name, of parents who have been honourable members of the great commonwealth, true to God, and true to man, and have scorned the paths of deceit and guile, as well as the ways of open sin and treacherous wickedness. "We must get back, Miss Griselda. Her ladyship will be returned. We must go at once." "Yes. But Norah--the child?"