seen that letter."

"Then you knew--but not all. Now I have had a sad relief. He told you
of--well, of my life, of my mother's hopeless insanity--and the rest."

"Yes--yes--all, I believe--all."

"Not quite all. I have spent a part at least of every August with her;
now at last she is dead. But my family story has left with me the fear of
dying like my brothers or of becoming as she became. When I came to you I
was a lonely soul, sick in mind and weak in body. I am better--far
better--and now with some renewal of hope and courage I shall face my
world again. You have had--you will have charity for my days of
melancholy. I never believed that a priest should marry--and yet I
did. I suffered, and never again can I dream of love. I am doubly armed
by memory and by the horror of continuing a race doomed to disaster.
There you have it all to my relief. There is some mysterious consolation
in unloading one's mind. How good you have been to me! and I have been so
useless--so little of what I might have been."

Penhallow rose, set a hand on Rivers's shoulder, seeing the sweat on his
forehead and the appeal of the sad eyes turned up to meet his gaze.
"What," he said, "would our children have been without you? God knows I
have been a better man for your company, and the mills--the village--how
can you fail to see what you have done--"

"No--no--I am a failure. It may be that the moods of self-reproach are
morbid. That too torments me. Even to-day I was thinking of how Christ
would have dealt with that miserable man, Peter Lamb, and how
uncharitable I was, how crude, how void of sympathy--"

"You--you--" said Penhallow, as he moved away. "My own regret is that
I did not turn him over to the law. Well, points of view do differ
curiously. We will let him drop. He will come to grief some day. And now
take my thanks and my dear Ann's for what you have told me. Let us drop
that too. Take a pipe."

"No, I must go. I am the easier in my mind, but I am tired and not at
all in the pipe mood." He went out through the hall, and with a hasty
"good-night" to his hostess and "pleasant dreams--or none," went slowly
down the avenue.

The woman he left, with her knitting needles at rest a moment, was
considering the man and his moods with such intuitive sympathy and
comprehension as belongs to the sex which is physiologically the more
subject to abrupt changes in the climate of the mind. As her husband
entered, she began anew the small s