‘Oh, Henry,’ said she, ’to think that you should have such a grief as this; your dear father’s tomb violated!’ and she sat down and sobbed.  ‘But there is a God in heaven,’ she added, rising with great solemnity.  ’Whoever has committed this dreadful crime against God and man will rue the day he was born:—­the curse of a dead man who has been really wronged no penance or prayer can cure,—­so my aunt in Wales used to say, and so Sinfi says;—­it clings to the wrongdoer and to his children.  That cry I heard was the voice of vengeance, and it came from your father’s tomb.’

‘It is a most infamous robbery,’ I said; ’but as to the curse, that is of course as powerless to work mischief as the breath of a baby.’  And again I anxiously looked around to see where was the dead body of Wynne, which I knew must be close by.

‘Oh, Henry!’ said she, ’listen to these words, these awful words of your dead father, and the words of the Bible too.’

And she held up to her eyes, as though fascinated by it, the parchment scroll, and read aloud in a voice so awe-struck that it did not seem to be her voice at all: 

’He who shall violate this tomb,—­he who shall steal this amulet, hallowed as a love-token between me and my dead wife,—­he who shall dare to lay a sacrilegious hand upon this cross, stands cursed by God, cursed by love, and cursed by me, Philip Aylwin, lying here.  “Let there be no man to pity him, nor to have compassion upon his fatherless children....Let his children be vagabonds, and beg their bread:  let them seek it also out of desolate places.”—­Psalm cix.  So saith the Lord.  Amen.’

‘I am in the toils,’ I murmured, with grinding teeth.

‘What a frightful curse!’ she said, shuddering.  ’It terrifies me to think of it.  How hard it seems,’ she continued, ’that the children should be cursed for the father’s crimes.’

‘But, Winifred, they are NOT so cursed,’ I cried.  ’It is all a hideous superstition:  one of Man’s idiotic lies!’

‘Henry,’ said she, shocked at my irreverence, ’it is so; the Bible says it, and all life shows it.  Ah!  I wonder what wretch committed the sacrilege, and why he had no pity on his poor innocent children!’

While she was talking, I stooped and picked up the casket from which the letters had been forced by the fall.  She had not seen it.  I put it in my pocket.

‘Henry, I am so grieved for you,’ said Winifred again, and she came and wound her fingers in mine.

Grieved for me!  But where was her father’s dead body?  That was the thought that appalled me.  Should we come upon it in the debris?  What was to be done?  Owing to the tide, there was no turning back now to Flinty Point.  The projecting debris must be passed.  There was no dallying for a moment.  If we lingered we should be caught by the tide in Mousetrap Cove, and then nothing could save us.  Suppose in passing the debris we should come upon her father’s corpse.  The idea was insupportable.  ’Thank God, however, I murmured, ’she will not even then know the very worst; she will see the corpse of her father who has fallen with the cliff, but she need not and will not associate him with the sacrilege and the curse.’