"Walter would never pass off what was not his own!" she exclaimed. "It isn't like him, or like any of the Marshall family."
"You forget his father," said the man beside her, carelessly thrusting aside a cone with his polished boot.
"What did his father do?" Jessie asked in some surprise, and her companion replied:
"You astonish me, Miss Graham, by professing ignorance of what Walter's father did. You know, of course."
"Indeed I do not," she returned. "I only know that there is something unpleasant connected with him,—something which annoys Walter terribly, but I never heard the story. I asked my father once and he seemed greatly agitated, saying he would rather not talk of it. Then I asked Ellen, but if she knew she would not tell, and she evaded all my questioning, so I gave it up, for I dare not ask Deacon Marshall or Walter either. What was it, Mr. Bellenger?"
William understood just how proud Jessie Graham was, and how she would be shocked at the very idea of public disgrace. Once convince her of the parent's guilt, and she will sicken of the son, he thought, so when she said again, "What was it? What did Mr. Marshall do?" he replied:
"If your father has kept it from you, I ought not to speak of it, perhaps; but this I will say, if Seth Marshall had his just deserts, he would now be the inmate of a felon's cell."
"Walter's father a felon!" Jessie exclaimed, bounding to her feet. "I never thought of anything as bad as that. Is it true? Oh! is it true?" and in the maiden's heart there was a new-born feeling, which, had Walter been there then, would have prompted her to shrink from him as if he, too, had been a sharer of his father's sin.
"You seem greatly excited," said William. "It must be that you are more deeply interested in young Marshall than I supposed."
"I am interested," she replied. "I have liked him so much that I never dreamed of associating him with dishonor."