, with a strange, impulsive feeling
that she brought consolation and help, threw herself into them.

"I know it all," said Phebe in a low voice. "Oh, what you must have
suffered! He was going to Engelberg to meet you, and you never saw him
alive! Oh, why did not God let you meet each other once again? But God
loved him. I can never think that God had not forgiven him, for he was
grieved because of his sin when I saw him the night he got away. And in
all things else he was so good! Oh, how good he was!"

Phebe's tears were falling fast, and her words were choked with sobs.
But Felicita's face was hidden against her neck, and she could not see
if she was weeping.

"Everybody is talking of him in Riversborough," she went on, "and now
they all say how good he always was, and how unlikely it is that he was
guilty. They will forget it soon. Those who remember him will think
kindly of him, and be grieved for him. But oh, I would give worlds for
him to have lived and made amends! If he could only have proved that he
had repented! If he could only have outlived it all, and made everybody
know that he was really a good man, one whom God had delivered out of
sin!"

"It was impossible!" murmured Felicita.

"No, not impossible!" she cried earnestly; "it was not an unpardonable
sin. Even if he had gone to prison, as he would, he might have faced the
world when he came out again; and if he'd done all the good he could in
it, it might have been hard to convince them he was good, but it would
never be impossible. If God forgives us, sooner or later our
fellow-creatures will forgive us, if we live a true life. I would have
stood by him in the face of the world, and you would, and Madame and the
children. He would not have been left alone, and it would have ended in
every one else coming round to us. Oh, why should he die when you were
just going to see each other again!"

Felicita had sunk down again into the chair which had been carried for
her to the shore, and Phebe sat down on the sands at her feet. She
looked up tearfully into Felicita's wan and shrunken face.

"Did any one ever win back their good name?" asked Felicita with
quivering lips.

"Among us they do sometimes," she answered. "I knew a working-man who
had been in jail five years, and he became a Christian while he was
there, and he came back home to his own village. He was one of the best
men I ever knew, and when he died there was such a funeral as had never
been