"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.