e Griselda--little Griselda. I
took you to Longueville, and left you there. You cried then to leave me;
you weep now to find me. Well, it is just. I have been a wicked wretch;
I have but little breath left--but take my poor little one out of
this--this stage-life. Take her, and try to love her; she is your
sister."

"I will," Griselda said. "I shall have a home soon--she shall share it."

"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 b