in this arbitrary punishment of the
evil-doer gave him a transient content. He did not object therefore to
Phebe's hasty visit to Mrs. Sefton at the sea-side, in order to break
the news to her. The inward satisfaction he felt sustained him, and he
even set about a piece of work long since begun, a hawk swooping down
upon his prey.

The evening on which Phebe reached home again he was more like his
former self. He asked her many questions about the sea, which he had
never seen, and told her what he had been doing while she was away. An
old, well-thumbed translation of Plato's Dialogues was lying on the
carved dresser behind him, in which he had been reading every night.
Instead of the Bible, he said.

"It was him, Mr. Roland, that gave it to me," he continued; "and listen
to what I read last night: 'Those who have committed crimes, great yet
not unpardonable, they are plunged into Tartarus, where they go who
betray their friends for money, the pains of which they undergo for a
year. But at the end of the year they come forth again to a lake, over
which the souls of the dead are taken to be judged. And then they lift
up their voices, and call upon the souls of them they have wronged to
have pity upon them, and to forgive them, and let them come out of their
prison. And if they prevail they come forth, and cease from their
troubles; but if not they are carried back again into Tartarus, until
they obtain mercy of them whom they have wronged.' But it seems as if
they have to wait until them they have wronged are dead themselves."

The brown, crooked fingers ceased spelling out the solemn words, and
Phebe lifted up her eyes from them to her father's face. She noticed for
the first time how sunken and sallow it was, and how dimly and wearily
his eyes looked out from under their shaggy eyebrows. She buried her
face in her hands, and broke down into a passion of tears. The vivid
picture her father's quotation brought before her mind filled it with
horror and grief that passed all words.

The wind was wailing round the house with a ceaseless moan of pain, in
which she could almost distinguish the tones of a human voice lamenting
its lost and wretched fate. The cry rose and fell, and passed on, and
came back again, muttering and calling, but never dying away
altogether. It sounded to her like the cry of a belated wanderer calling
for help. She rose hastily and opened the cottage door, as if she could
hear Roland Sefton's voic