one else to help me."
"But what have you done, sir?" she asked, with a tremulous, long-drawn sigh.
"Done?" he repeated; "ay! there's the question. I wonder if I can be honest and true now with only Phebe Marlowe listening. I could have told my mother, perhaps, if it had been of any use; but I would die rather than tell Felicita. Done, Phebe! I've appropriated securities trusted to my keeping, pledging some and selling others for my own use. I've stolen £10,000."
"And you could be sent to prison for it?" she said, in a low voice, glancing uneasily round as if she fancied she would be overheard.
"For I don't know how many years," he answered.
"It would kill Mrs. Sefton," she said. "Oh! how could you do it?"
"It was for Felicita I did it," he replied absently; "for my Felicita only."
For a few minutes Phebe's brain was busy, but not yet with the most sorrowful thoughts. There could be no shadow of doubt in her mind that this dearest friend of hers, sitting beside her in the twilight, was guilty of the crime he had confessed. But she could not as yet dwell upon the crime. He was in imminent peril; and his peril threatened the welfare of nearly all whom she loved. Ruin and infamy for him meant ruin and infamy for them all. She must save him if possible.
"Phebe," he said, breaking the dreary silence, "I ought to tell you one thing more. The money your father left with me—the savings of his life—six hundred pounds—it is all gone. He intrusted it to me, and made his will, appointing me your guardian; such confidence he had in me. I have made both him and you penniless."
"I think nothing of that," she answered. "What should I ever have been but for you? A dull, ignorant country girl, living a life little higher than my sheep and cattle. We are rich enough, my father and me. This cottage, and the fields about it, are our own. But I must go and tell father."
"Must he be told?" asked Roland Sefton anxiously.
"We've no secrets," she replied; "and there's no fear of him, you know. He would see if I was in trouble; and I shall be in trouble," she added, in a sorrowful voice.
She opened the cottage door, and going out left him alone. It was a familiar place to him; but hitherto it had been only the haunt of happy holidays, from the time when he had been a school-boy until his last autumn's shooting of grouse and woodcock on the wide moors. Old Marlowe had been one of his earliest friends, and Phebe had been something like a humble younger sister to him. If any one in the world could be depended upon to help him, outside his own family, it must be old Marlowe and his daughter.
And yet, when she left him, his first impulse was to rise and flee while yet there was time—before old Marlowe knew his secret. Phebe was a girl, living as girls do, in a region of sentiment and feeling, hardly understanding a crime against property. A girl like her had no idea of what his responsibility and his guilt were, money ranking so low in her estimate of life. But old Marlowe would look at it quite differently. His own careful earnings, scraped together by untiring industry and ceaseless self-denial, were lost—stolen by the man he had trusted implicitly. For Roland Sefton did not spare himself any reproaches; he did not attempt to hide or palliate his sin. There were other securities for small sums, like old Marlowe's, gone like his, and ruin would overtake half a dozen poor families, though the bulk of the loss would fall upon his senior partner, who was a hard man, of unbending sternness and integrity. If old Marlowe proved a man of the same inflexible stamp, he was lost.
But he sat still, waiting and listening. Round that lonely cottage, as he well knew, the wind swept from whatever quarter it was blowing; sighing softly, or wailing, moaning, or roaring past it, as ceaselessly as the sound of waves against a fisherman's hut on the sea-coast. It was crying and sobbing now, rising at intervals into a shriek, as if to warn him of coming peril. He went to the window and met the black face of the night, hiding everything from his eye. Neither moon nor star gleamed in the sky. But even if old Marlowe was merciful he could not stay there, but must go out, as he had done last night from his own home, lashed like a dog from every familiar hearth by an unseen hand and a heavy scourge.
Phebe had not lingered, though she seemed long away. As she drew near the little workshop she saw the wagon half-laden with some church furniture her father had been carving, and with which he and she were to start at daybreak for a village about twenty miles off. She heard the light tap of his carving tools as she opened the door, and found him finishing the wings of a spread-eagle. He had pushed back the paper cap he wore from his forehead, which was deeply furrowed, and shaded by a few straggling tufts of gray hair. He took no notice of her entrance until she touched his arm with her hand; and then he looked at her with eyes, blue like her own, but growing dim with age, and full of the pitiful, uncomplaining gaze of one who is deaf and dumb. But his face brightened and his smile was cheerful, as he began to talk eagerly with his fingers, throwing in many gestures to aid his slow speech. Phebe, too, smiled and gesticulated in silent answer, before she told him her errand.
"The carving is finished, father," she said. "Could we not start at once, and be at Upchurch before five to-morrow morning?"
"Twenty miles; eight hours; easily," he answered; "but why?"
"To help Mr. Sefton," she said. "He wants to get down to Southampton, and Upchurch is in the way. Father, it must be done; you would never see a smile upon my face again if we did not do it."
The keen, wistful eyes of her father were fastened alternately upon her troubled face and her moving hands, as slowly and silently she spelt out on her fingers the sad story she had just listened to. His own face changed rapidly from astonishment to dismay, and from dismay to a passionate rage. If Roland Sefton could have seen it he would have made good his escape. But still Phebe's fingers went on pleading for him; and the smile, which she said her father would never see again—a pale, wan smile—met his eyes as he watched her.
"He has been so good to you and me," she went on, with a sob in her throat; and unconsciously she spoke out the words aloud and slowly as she told them off on her fingers; "he learned to talk with you as I do, and he is the only person almost in the world who can talk to you without your slate and pencil, father. It was good of him to take that trouble. And his father was your best friend, wasn't he? How good Madame used to be when I was a little girl, and you were carving all that woodwork at the old bank, and she let me stay there with you! All our happiest days have come through them. And now we can deliver them from great misery."
"But my money?" he interposed.
"Money is nothing between friends," she said eagerly. "Will you make my life miserable, father? I shall be thinking of them always, night and day; and they will never see me again if he is sent to jail through our fault. There never was a kinder man than he is; and I always thought him a good man till now."
"A thief; worse than a common thief," said her father. "What will become of my little daughter when I am dead?"
Phebe made no answer except by tears. For a few minutes old Marlowe watched her bowed head and face hidden in her hands, till a gray hue came upon his withered face, and the angry gleam died away from his eyes. Hitherto her slightest wish had been a law to him, and to see her weeping was anguish to him. To have a child who could hear and speak had been a joy that had redeemed his life from wretchedness, and crowned it with an inexhaustible delight. If he never saw her smile again, what would become of him? She was hiding her face from him even now, and there was no medium of communication between them save by touch. He must call her attention to what he had to say by making her look at him. Almost timidly he stretched out his withered and cramped hand to lay it upon her head.
"I must do whatever you please," he said,
