She looked at him with wide-open, startled eyes. "My mother, Sir Wilfred! no, I was only seven when she died. I think," knitting her white brows as though she were trying to recall that childish past, "that she was very ill--she had to go away for a long time, and my poor father seemed very sad. I remember he cried dreadfully at her funeral, and Raby told me I ought to have cried too." "I loved your mother, Margaret," returned the old man, and his mouth twitched under his white mustache. "You are not like her; she was dark, but very beautiful. Yes, she was ill, with that deadly hereditary illness that we call by another name; so ill that for years before her death her husband could not see her." "You mean--" asked Margaret, but her dry white lips refused to finish the sentence. Sir Wilfred looked at her pityingly, as he answered-- "She was insane. It was in the family--they told me so, and that was why I did not ask her to marry me. She was beautiful, and so many loved her--your father and I among the number. Now you know, Margaret, that while my heart bleeds for you both, I ask you to release my son." CHAPTER IV. "WHEN WE TWO PARTED." Nay--sometimes seems it I could even bear To lay down humbly this love-crown I wear, Steal from my palace, helpless, hopeless, poor, And see another queen it at the door-- If only that the king had done no wrong, If this my palace where I dwelt so long Were not defiled by falsehood entering in. There is no loss but change; no death but sin; No parting, save the slow corrupting pain Of murdered faith that never lives again. MISS MULOCK. The following evening Margaret walked down the narrow path leading to the shore. It was a glorious evening, warm with the dying sunset, gorgeous with red and golden light. Broad margins of yellow sands, white headlands, mossy cliffs, with the scarlet poppies and pink-eyed convolvuli growing out of the weedy crevices; above, a blue ineffable sky scored deeply with tinted clouds, and a sea dipping on the shore with a long slow ripple of sound; under a bowlder a child bathing her feet in a little runlet of a pool, while all round, heaped up with coarse wavy grasses, lay seaweed--brown, coralline, and purple--their salty fragrance steeping the air; everywhere the sound of cool splashes and a murmur of peace. The child sat under the bowlder alone, a small brown creature in picturesque-looking rags, a mere waif and stray of a child, with her feet trailing in the pool; every now and then small mottled crabs scrambled crookedly along, or dug graves for themselves in the dry waved sand. The girl watched them idly, as she flapped long ribbons of brown seaweed, or dribbled the water through her hollowed hands, while a tired sea-gull that had lowered wing was skimming slowly along the margin of the water.