confidence of your life. Not even Mrs. Penhallow has seen that letter."

"Then you knew--but not all. Now I have had a sad relief. He told you
of--well, of my life, of my mother's hopeless insanity--and the rest."

"Yes--yes--all, I believe--all."

"Not quite all. I have spent a part at least of every August with her;
now at last she is dead. But my family story has left with me the fear of
dying like my brothers or of becoming as she became. When I came to you I
was a lonely soul, sick in mind and weak in body. I am better--far
better--and now with some renewal of hope and courage I shall face my
world again. You have had--you will have charity for my days of
melancholy. I never believed that a priest should marry--and yet I
did. I suffered, and never again can I dream of love. I am doubly armed
by memory and by the horror of continuing a race doomed to disaster.
There you have it all to my relief. There is some mysterious consolation
in unloading one's mind. How good you have been to me! and I have been so
useless--so little of what I might have been."

Penhallow rose, set a hand on Rivers's shoulder, seeing the sweat on his
forehead and the appeal of the sad eyes turned up to meet his gaze.
"What," he said, "would our children have been without you? God knows I
have been a better man for your company, and the mills--the village--how
can you fail to see what you have done--"

"No--no--I am a failure. It may be that the moods of self-reproach are
morbid. That too torments me. Even to-day I was thinking of how Christ
would have dealt with that miserable man, Peter Lamb, and how
uncharitable I was, how crude, how void of sympathy--"