cast
himself on my mercy, I should have pardoned him; but again I think my
heart was too hard then to know what mercy was. But those two, Felix, my
son Robert, who died of starvation in the streets of Paris, and your
father, who perished on a winter's night in Switzerland, they are my
daily companions. They sit down beside me here, and by the fireside, and
at my solitary meals; and they watch beside me in the night. They will
never leave me till I see them again, and confess my sin to them."

"It was not you alone whom my father wronged," said Felix, "there were
others besides you who might have prosecuted him."

"Yes, but they were ignorant, simple men," replied Mr. Clifford, "they
need never have known of his crime. All their money could have been
replaced without their knowledge; it was of me Roland was afraid. If the
time could come over again--and I go over and over it in my own mind all
in vain--I would act altogether differently. I would make him feel to
the utmost the sin and peril of his course; but I would keep his secret.
Even Felicita should know nothing. It was partly my fault too. If I had
fulfilled my duty, and looked after my affairs instead of dreaming my
time away in Italy, your father, as the junior partner, could not have
fallen into this snare. When a crime is committed the criminal is not
the only one to be blamed. Consciously or unconsciously those about him
have been helping by their own carelessness and indolence, by cowardice,
by indifference to right and wrong. By a thousand subtle influences we
help our brother to disobey God; and when he is found out we stand aloof
and raise an outcry against him. God has made every one of us his
brother's keeper."

"Then you too have forgiven him," said Felix, with a glowing sense of
comfort in his heart.

"Forgiven him? ay!" he answered, "as he sits by me at the fireside,
invisible to all but me, I say to him again and again in words inaudible
to all but him:

'Even as I hope for pardon in that day,
When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits,
So be thou pardoned.'"

The tremulous, weak old voice paused, and the withered hands lay feebly
on his knees as he looked out on the summer sky, seeing nothing of its
brightness, for the thoughts and memories that were flocking to his
brain. Felix's younger eyes caught every familiar object on which the
sun was shining, and knitted them up for ever with the memory of that
hour.

"God help me