ot across the gloom in Felix's heart, and lit
up his dejected face with a momentary smile; and Mr. Clifford stretched
out his thin old hand again, and clasped his feebly.

"Ah, my boy!" he said, "and your father was not a bad man. I know how
you are sitting in judgment upon him, as young people do, who do not
know what it is to be sorely tempted. I judged him, and my son before
him, as harshly as man could do. Remember we judge hardest where we love
the most; there's selfishness in it. Our children, our fathers, must be
better than other folk's children and fathers. Don't begin to reckon up
your father's sins before you are thirty, and don't pass sentence till
you're fifty. Judges ought to be old men."

Felix sat down near to the old man, whose chair was in the oriel window,
on which the sun was shining warmly. There below him lay the garden
where he had played as a child, with the river flowing swiftly past it,
and the boat-house in the corner, from which his father and he had so
often started for a pleasant hour or two on the rapid current. But he
could never think of his father again without sorrow and shame.

"Sin hurts us most as it comes nearest to us," said old Mr. Clifford;
"the crime of a Frenchman does not make our blood boil as the crime of
an Englishman; our neighbor's sin is not half as black as our kinsman's
sin. But when we have to look it in the face in a son, in a father, then
we see the exceeding sinfulness of it. Why, Felix, you knew that men
defrauded one another; that even men professing godliness were
sometimes dishonest."

"I knew it," he answered, "but I never felt it before."

"And I never felt it till I saw it in my son," continued the old man,
sadly; "but there are other sins besides dishonesty, of a deeper dye,
perhaps, in the sight of our Creator. If Roland Sefton had met with a
more merciful man than I am he might have been saved."

For a minute or two his white head was bowed down, and his wrinkled
eyelids were closed, whilst Felix sat beside him as sorrowful as
himself.

"I could not be merciful," he burst out with a sudden fierceness in his
face and tone, "I could not spare him, because I had not spared my own
son. I had let one life go down into darkness, refusing to stretch out
so much as a little finger in help, though he was as dear to me as my
own life; and God required me yet again to see a life perish because of
my hardness of heart. I think sometimes if Roland had come and