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.