oul, were indeed a light to his
feet and a lamp to his path!

That evening another couple were seated also at their dinner-table, and
a different conversation was being held. The master of Harcourt Manor
sat at the foot of the table, opposite his gentle wife; but a troubled
look was on his face, brought there very much by the thought that he
noticed an extra shade both of weariness and sadness on the face of his
wife. What could he do to dissipate it? he was asking himself. Anything,
except speak the word which he was well aware would have the desired
effect, and, were she still alive, restore to her mother's arms the
child for whom she pined; but not yet was the strong self-will so broken
down that those words could be spoken by him, not yet had he so felt the
need of forgiveness for his own soul that he could forgive as he hoped
to be forgiven.

Did not his duty as a parent, and his duty towards other parents of his
own rank in life, call upon him to make a strong stand, and visit with
his righteous indignation such a sin as that of his only child and
heiress marrying a man, however good, upright, and highly educated he
might be, who yet was beneath her in station (although he denied that
fact), and unable to keep her in the comfort and luxury to which she had
been accustomed?

"No, no, _noblesse oblige_;" and rather than forgive such a sin, he
would blight his own life and break the heart of the wife he adored.
Such was the state of mind in which the master of Harcourt Manor had
remained since the sad night when his only child had gone off to be
married at a neighbouring church to the young musician Heinz. But some
months before Reginald Gower's return from abroad, during a severe
illness which had brought him to the borderland, Mr. Willoughby was
aroused to a dawning sense of his own sinfulness and need of pardon,
which had, almost unconsciously to himself, a softening effect on his
mind.

His wife was the first to break the silence at the dinner-table. "Has
not Reginald Gower grown more manly and older-looking since we saw him
last?" she said, addressing her husband.

A shade came over his face as he answered somewhat testily, "Oh, I think
he looks well enough! Of course five years must have made him look
older. But Reginald never was the favourite with me that he is with you,
wife; a self-indulgent lad he always seems to me to be."

"Well, but surely, husband" (once she always called him father, but that
w