“I do not understand him, mamma,” said Agnes: “does everybody hate him--has he done wrong to every one?” Mrs Atheling sighed. “My dears, if I tell you, you must forget it again, and never mention it to any one. Papa had a pretty young sister, little Bride, as they all called her, the sweetest girl I ever saw. Mr Reginald come courting her a long time, but at last she found out--oh girls! oh, children!--that what he meant was not true love, but something that it would be a shame and a sin so much as to name; and it broke her dear heart, and she died. Her grave is at Winterbourne; that was what papa and I went to see the first day.” “Mamma,” cried Agnes, starting up in great excitement and agitation, “why did you suffer us to know any one belonging to such a man?” “Well, my dear,” said Mrs Atheling, a little discomposed by this appeal. “I thought it was for the best. Coming here, we were sure to be thrown into their way--and perhaps he may have repented. And then Mrs Edgerley was very kind to you, and I did not think it right, for the father’s sake, to judge harshly of the child.” Marian, who had covered her face with her hands, looked up now with abashed and glistening eyes. “Is that why papa dislikes him so?” said Marian, very low, and still sheltering with her raised hands her dismayed and blushing face. Mrs Atheling hesitated a moment. “Yes,” she said doubtfully, after a pause of consideration--“yes; that and other things.” But the inquiry of the girls could not elicit from Mamma what were the other things which were sufficient to share with this as motives of Mr Atheling’s dislike. They were inexpressibly shocked and troubled by the story, as people are who, contemplating evil at a visionary distance, and having only a visionary belief in it, suddenly find a visible gulf yawning at their own feet; and Agnes could not help thinking, with horror and disgust, of being in the same room with this man of guilt, and of that polluting kiss of his, from which Rachel shrank as from the touch of pestilence. “Such a man ought to be marked and singled out,” cried Agnes, with unreasoning youthful eloquence: “no one should dare to bring him into the same atmosphere with pure-minded people; everybody ought to be warned of who and what he was.” “Nay; God has not done so,” said Mrs Atheling with a sigh. “He has offended God more than he ever could offend man, but God bears with him. I often say so to your father when we speak of the past. Ought we, who are so sinful ourselves, to have less patience than God?”