As he finished speaking he opened his eyes, and saw those of Felicita fastened on the reflection of his face in the mirror. He turned away, and in a minute or two resumed his seat, and spoke again in his ordinary abrupt tone.

"What will you do?" he asked.

"I cannot tell yet," she answered; "I must wait till suspense is over. If Roland comes back, or is brought back," she faltered, "then I must decide what to do. I shall keep to myself till then. Is there anything I can do?"

"Could you go to your uncle, Lord Riversdale?" suggested Mr. Clifford.

"No, no," she cried; "I will not ask any help from him. He arranged my marriage for me, and he will feel this disgrace keenly. I will keep out of their way; they shall not be compelled to forbid me their society."

"But to-morrow you had better go away for the day," he answered; "there will be people coming and going, who will disturb you. There will be a rigorous search made. There is a detective now with my lawyer, who is looking through the papers in the bank. The police have taken possession of Acton's lodgings."

"I have nowhere to go," she replied, "and I cannot show my face out of doors. Madame and the children shall go to Phebe Marlowe, but I must bear it as well as I can."

"Well," he said after a brief pause, "I will make it as easy as I can for you. You are thinking me a hard man? Yes, I have grown hard. I was soft enough once. But if I forgave any sinner now I should do my boy, who is dead, an awful injustice. I would not pass over his sin, and I dare not pass over any other. I know I shall pursue Roland until his death or mine; my son's fate cries out for it. But I'm not a hard man toward innocent sufferers, like you and his poor mother. Try to think of me as your friend; nay, even Roland's friend, for what would a few years' penal servitude be compared with my boy's death? Shake hands with me before I go."

The small, delicate hand she offered him was icy cold, though her face was still calm and her eyes clear and dry. He was himself more moved and agitated than she appeared to be. The mention of his son always shook him to the very centre of his soul; yet he had not been able to resist uttering the words that had passed his lips during this painful interview with Roland's young wife. Unshed tears were burning under his eyelids. But if it had not been for that death-like hand he might have imagined her almost unmoved.

Felicita was down-stairs before Madame the next morning, and had ordered the carriage to be ready to take her and the children to Upfold Farm directly after breakfast. It was so rare an incident for their mother to be present at the breakfast-table that Felix and Hilda felt as if it were a holiday. Madame was pale and sad, and for the first time Felicita thought of her as being a sufferer by Roland's crime. Her husband's mother had been little more to her than a superior housekeeper, who had been faithfully attached to her and her children. The homely, gentle, domestic foreigner, from a humble Swiss home, had looked up to her young aristocratic daughter-in-law as a being from a higher sphere. But now the downcast, sorrowful face of the elder woman touched Felicita's sympathy.

"Mother!" she said, as soon as the children had run away to get ready for their drive. She had never before called Madame "mother," and a startled look, almost of delight, crossed Madame's sad face.

"My daughter!" she cried, running to Felicita's side, and throwing her arms timidly about her, "he is sure to come back soon—to-day, I think. Oh, yes, he will be here when we return! You do well to stay to meet him; and I should be glad to be here, but for the children. Yes, the little ones must be out of the way. They must not see their father's house searched; they must never know how he is suspect. Acton did say it was all his fault; his fault and—"

But here Madame paused for an instant, for had not Acton said it was Felicita's fault more than any one's?

"Phebe heard him," she went on hastily; "and if it is not his fault, why did he kill himself? Oh, it is an ill-fortune that my son went to London that day! It would all be right if he were here; but he is sure to come to-day and explain it all; and the bank will be opened again. So be of good comfort, my daughter; for God is present with us, and with my son also."

It was a sorrowful day at the Upfold Farm in spite of the children's unconscious mirthfulness. Old Marlowe locked himself into his workshop, and would see none of them, taking his meals there in sullen anger. Phebe's heart was almost broken with listening to Madame's earnest asseverations of her son's perfect innocence, and her eager hopes to find him when she reached home. It was nearly impossible to her to keep the oppressive secret, which seemed crushing her into deception and misery, and her own muteness appeared to herself more condemnatory than any words could be. But Madame did not notice her silence, and her grief was only natural. Phebe's tears fell like balm on Madame's aching heart. Felicita had not wept; but this young girl, and her abandonment to passionate bursts of tears, who needed consoling herself, was a consolation to the poor mother. They knelt together in Phebe's little bedroom, while the children were playing on the wide uplands around them, and they prayed silently, if heavy sobs and sighs could be called silence; but they prayed together, and for her son; and Madame returned home comforted and hopeful.

It had been a day of fierce trial to Felicita. She had not formed any idea of how searching would be the investigation of the places where any of her husband's papers might be found. Her own study was not exempt from the prying eyes of the detectives. This room, sacred to her, which Roland himself never entered without permission was ransacked, and forever desecrated in her eyes. This official meddling with her books and her papers could never be forgotten. The pleasant place was made an abomination to her.

The bank was reopened the next morning at the accustomed hour, for a very short investigation by Mr. Clifford and the experienced advisers summoned from London to assist him proved that the revenues of the firm were almost as good as ever. The panic had been caused by the vague rumor afloat of some mysterious complicity in crime between the absent partner and the clerk who had committed suicide. It was, therefore, considered necessary for the prosperous re-establishment of the bank to put forth a cautiously worded circular, in which Mr. Clifford's return was made the reason for the absence on a long journey of Roland Sefton, whose disappearance had to be accounted for. By the time he was arrested and brought to trial the confidence of the bank's customers in its stability would in some measure be regained.

There was thus a good deal of conjecture and of contradictory opinion abroad in Riversborough concerning Roland Sefton, which continued to be the town's-talk for some weeks. Even Madame began to believe in a half-bewildered manner that her son had gone on a journey of business connected with the bank, though she could not account for his total silence. Sometimes she wondered if he and Felicita could have had some fatal quarrel, which had driven him away from home in a paroxysm of passionate disappointment and bitterness. Felicita's coldness and indifference might have done it. With this thought, and the hope of his return some day, she turned for relief to the discharge of her household duties, and to the companionship of the children, who knew nothing except that their father was gone away on a journey, and might come back any day.

Neither Madame nor the children knew that whenever they left the house they were followed by a detective, and every movement was closely watched. But Felicita was conscious of it by some delicate sensitiveness of her imaginative temperament. She refused to quit the house except in the evening, when she rambled about the garden, and felt the fresh air from the river breathing against her often aching temples. Even then she fancied an eye upon her—an unsleeping, unblinking eye; the unwearying vigilance of justice on the watch for a criminal. Night and day she felt herself living under its stony gaze.

It was a positive pain to her when reviews of her book appeared in various papers, and were forwarded to her with congratulatory letters from her publishers. She was living far enough from London to be easily persuaded, without much vanity, that her name was upon everybody's lips there. She read the reviews, but with a sick heart, and the words were forgotten as soon as she put them away; but the Riversborough papers, which had been very guarded in their statements about the death of Acton and the events at the Old Bank, took up the book with what appeared to her fulsome and offensive enthusiasm. It had never occurred to her that local criticism was certain to follow the appearance of a local writer; and she shrank from it with morbid and exaggerated disgust. Even if all had been well, if Roland had been beside her, their notices would have been well-nigh intolerable to her. She could not have endured being stared at and pointed out in the streets of her own little town. But now Fame had come to her with broken wings and a cracked trumpet, and she shuddered at the sound of her own name harshly proclaimed through it.

It soon became evident that Roland Sefton had succeeded in getting away out of the country. The police were at fault; and as no one in his own home knew how to communicate with him, no clew had been discovered by close surveillance of their movements. Such vigilance could be kept up only for a few months at longest, and as the summer drew toward the end it ceased.



CHAPTER IX.

FAST BOUND.

Roland Sefton had met with but few difficulties in getting clear away out of England, and there was little chance of his being identified, from description merely, by any of the foreign police, or by any English detective on the Continent who was not as familiar with his personal appearance as the Riversborough force were. In his boyhood he had spent many months, years even, in his mother's native village with her father, M. Roland Merle, the pastor of a parish among the Jura Mountains. It was as easy for him to assume the character of a Swiss mountaineer as to sustain that of a prosperous English banker. The dress, the patois, the habits of the peasant were all familiar to him, and his disguise in them was as complete as disguise ever can be. The keen eye either of love or hate can pierce through all disguises.

Switzerland was all fatherland to him, as much so as his native country, and the county in which Riversborough was situated. There was no ignorance in him of any little town, or the least known of the Alps, which might betray the stranger. He would never need to attract notice by asking a question. He had become a member of an Alpine club as soon as his boyish thews and sinews were strong enough for stiff and perilous climbing. He had crossed the most difficult passes and scaled some of the worst peaks. And there had been within him that passionate love of the country common to the Swiss which an English Alpine climber can never feel. His mother's land had filled him with an ardent flame, smouldering at times amid the absorbing interests of his somewhat prominent place in English life, but every now and then breaking out into an irrepressible longing for the sight of its white mountains and swift, strong streams. It was at once the safest and the most dangerous of refuges. He would be certainly sought for there; but there he could most effectually conceal himself. He flew thither with his burden of sin and shame.

Roland adopted at once the dress of a decent artisan of the Jura—such a man as he had known in his boyhood as a watchmaker of Locle or the Doubs. For a few days he stayed in Geneva, lodging in such a street as a Locle artisan would have chosen; but he could not feel secure there, in spite of his own certainty that his transformation was complete. A restless dread haunted him. He knew well that there are in every one little personal traits, tricks of gesture, and certain tones of voice always ready to betray us. It was yet too early in the year for many travellers to be journeying to Switzerland; but already a few straggling pioneers of the summer flight were appearing in the larger towns, and what would be his fate if any one of them recognized him? He quitted Geneva, and wandered away into the mountain villages.

It was May-time, and the snow-line was still lingering low down on the steep slopes, though the flowers were springing into life up to its very margin, seeming to drive it higher and higher every day. The High Alps were still fast locked in midwinter, and with untrodden wastes and plains of snow lying all around them. The deserted mountain farms and great solitary hotels, so thronged last summer, were empty. But in the valleys and the little villages lying on the warm southern slopes, or sheltered by precipitous rocks from the biting winds, there was everywhere a joyous stir of awakening from the deep sleep of winter. The frozen streams were thawed and ran bubbling and gurgling along their channels, turning water-wheels and filling all the quiet places with their merry noise. The air itself was full of sweet exhilaration. In the forests there was the scent of stirring sap and of the up-springing wild-flowers, and the rosy blossoms of the tender young larch-trees shone like jewels in the bright sunshine. The mountain-peaks overhead, gleaming through the mists and clouds, were of dazzling whiteness, for none of the frozen snow had yet fallen from their sharp, lance-like summits.

Journeying on foot from one village to another, Roland roamed about aimlessly, yet as one hunted, seeking for a safe asylum. He bore his troubled conscience and aching heart from one busy spot to another, homesick and self-exiled. Oh, what a fool he had been! Life had been full to the brim for him with gladness and prosperity, and in trying to make its cup run over he had dashed it away from his lips forever.

His money was not yet spent, for a very little went a long way among these simple mountain villages, and in his manner of travelling. He had not yet been forced to try to earn a living, and he felt no anxiety for the future. In his boyhood he had learned wood-carving, both in Switzerland and from old Marlowe, and he had acquired considerable skill in the art. Some of the panels in his home at Riversborough were the workmanship of his own hands. It was a craft to turn to in extremity; but he did not think of it yet.

Labor of any kind would have made the interminable hours pass more quickly. The carving of a piece of wood might have kept him from torturing his own heart perpetually; but he did not turn to this slight solace. There were times when he sat for hours, for a whole age, as it seemed to him, in some lonely spot, hidden behind a great rock or half lost in a forest, thinking. And yet it was not thought, but a vague, mournful longing and remembrance, the past and the absent blended in dim, shadowy reverie, of which nothing was clear but the sharp anguish of having forfeited them. There was a Garden of Eden still upon earth, and he had been dwelling in it. But he had banished himself from it by his own folly and sin, and when he turned his eyes toward it he could see only the "flaming brand, and the gate with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms." But even Adam had his Eve with him, "to drop some natural tears, and wipe them soon." He was utterly alone.

If his thoughts, so dazed and bewildered usually, became clear for a little while, it was always Felicita whose image stood out most distinctly before him. He had loved her passionately; surely never had any man loved a woman with the same intensity—so he said to himself. Even now the very crime he had committed seemed as nothing to him, because he had been guilty of it for her. His love for her covered its heinousness from his eyes. His conscience had become the blind and dumb slave of his passion. So blind and dumb had it been that it had scarcely stirred or murmured until his sin was found out, and it was scarcely aroused to life even yet.

In a certain sense he had been religious, having been most sedulously trained in religion from his earliest consciousness. He had accepted the ordinary teachings of our nineteenth-century Christianity. His place in church, beside his mother or his wife, had seldom been empty, and several times in the year he had knelt with them at the Lord's table, and taken the Lord's Supper, feeling himself distinctly a more religious man than usual on such occasions. No man had ever heard him utter a profane word, nor had he transgressed any of the outward rules of a religious life. It is true he had never made a vehement and extraordinary profession of piety, such as some men do; but there was not a person in Riversborough who would not have spoken of him as a good churchman and a Christian. While he had been gradually appropriating Mr. Clifford's money and the hard-earned savings of poorer men confided to him, he had felt no qualm of conscience in giving liberally to many a religious and philanthropic object, contributing such sums as figure well in a subscription list; though it was generally his wife's name that figured there. He had never taken up a subscription list without glancing first for that beloved name, Mrs. Roland Sefton.

In those days he had never doubted that he was a Christian. So far as he knew, so far as words could teach him, he was living a Christian life. Did he not believe in God, the Father Almighty? Yes, as fully as those who lived about him. Had he not followed Christ? As closely as the mass of people who call themselves Christians. Nay, more than most of them. Not as much as his mother perhaps, in her simple, devout faith. But then religion is always a different thing with women than with men, a fairer and more delicate thing, wearing a finer bloom and gloss, which does not wear well in a work-a-day world such as he did battle in. But if he had not lived a Christian life, what man in Riversborough had done so, except a few fanatics?

But his religion had been powerless to keep him from falling into subtle temptations, and into a crime so heinous in the sight of his fellow-men that it was only to be expiated by the loss of character, the loss of liberty, and the loss of every honorable man's esteem. The web had been closely and cunningly woven, and now he was fast bound in it, with no way of escape.



CHAPTER X.

LEAVING RIVERSBOROUGH.

The weeks passed by in Riversborough, and brought no satisfactory conclusion to the guarded investigations of the police. A close search made among Acton's private papers produced no discovery. His will was among them, leaving all he had to leave, which was not much, to Felix, the son of his friend and employer, Roland Sefton. There was no memorandum or letter which could throw any light upon the transactions, or give any clew to what had been done with Mr. Clifford's securities.

Nor was the watch kept over the movements of the family more successful. The police were certain that no letter was posted by any member of the household, which could be intended for the missing culprit. Even Phebe Marlowe's correspondence was subject to their vigilance. But not a trace could be discovered. He was gone; whether he had fled to America, or concealed himself nearer home on the Continent, no one could make a guess.

Mr. Clifford remained in Riversborough, and resumed his position as head of the firm. He had returned with the intention of doing so, having heard abroad of the extravagant manner in which his junior partner was living. The bank, though seriously crippled in its credit and resources, was in no danger of insolvency, and there seemed no reason why it should not regain its former prosperity, if only confidence could be restored. He had reserved to himself the power of taking in another partner, if he should deem it advisable; and an eligible one presenting himself, in the person of a Manchester man of known wealth, the deeds of partnership were drawn up, and the Old Bank was once more set up on a firm basis.

During the time that elapsed while these arrangements were being made, Felicita was visibly suffering, and failing in health. So sensitive had she grown to the dread of seeing any one not in the immediate circle of her household, that it became impossible to her to leave her home. The clear colorlessness of her face had taken on a transparency and delicacy which did not lessen its beauty, but added to it an unearthly grace. She no longer spent hours alone in her desecrated room; it had grown intolerable to her; but she sat speechless, and almost motionless, in the oriel window overlooking the garden and the river; and Felix, a child of dreamy and sensitive temperament, would sit hour after hour at her feet, pressing his cheek against her knee, or with his uplifted eyes gazing into her face.

"Mother," he said one day, when Roland had been gone more than a month, "how long will my father be away on his journey? Doesn't he ever write to you, and send messages to me? Grandmamma says she does not know how soon he will be back. Do you know, mother?"

Felicita looked down on him with her beautiful dark eyes, which seemed larger and sadder than of old, sending a strange thrill through the boy's heart, and for a minute or two she seemed uncertain what to say.

"I cannot tell you, Felix," she answered; "there are many things in life which children cannot understand. If I told you what was true about your father, your little brain would turn it into an untruth. You could not understand it if I told you."

"But I shall understand it some day," he said, lifting his head up proudly; "will you tell me when I am old enough, mother?"

How could she promise him to do that? This proud young head, tossed back with the expectant triumph of some day knowing all that his father and mother knew, must be bowed down with grief and shame then, as hers was now. It was a sad knowledge he must inherit. How would she ever be able to tell him that the father who had given him life, and whose name he bore, was a criminal; a convict if he was arrested and brought to judgment; an outlaw and an exile if he made good his escape? Roland had never been as dear to her as Felix was. She was one of those women who love more deeply and tenderly as mothers than as wives. To see that bright, fond face of his clouded with disgrace would be a ceaseless torment to her. There would be no suffering to compare with it.

"But you will tell me all about it some day, mother," urged the boy.

"If I ever tell you," she answered, "it will be when you are a man, and can understand the whole truth. You will never hear me tell a falsehood, Felix."

"I know that, mother," he replied, "but oh! I miss my father! He used to come to my bedside at nights, and kiss me, and say 'God bless you.' I tried always to keep awake till he came; but I was asleep the last time of all, and missed him. Sometimes I feel frightened, as if he would never come again. But grandmamma says he is gone on a long journey, and will come home some day, only she doesn't know when. Phebe cries when I ask her. Would it be too much trouble for you to come in at night sometimes, like my father did?" he asked timidly.

"But I am not like your father," she answered. "I could not say 'God bless you' in the same way. You must ask God yourself for His blessing."

For Felicita's soul had been thrust down into the depths of darkness. Her early training had been simply and solely for this world: how to make life here graceful and enjoyable. She could look back upon none but the vaguest aspirations after something higher in her girlhood. It had been almost like a new revelation to her to see her mother-in-law's simple and devout piety, and to witness her husband's cheerful and manly profession of religion. This was the point in his character which had attracted her most, and had been most likely to bind her to him. Not his passionate love to herself, but his unselfishness toward others, his apparently happy religion, his energetic interest in all good and charitable schemes—these had reconciled her more than anything else to the step she had taken, the downward step, in marrying him.

This unconscious influence of Roland's life and character had been working secretly and slowly upon her nature for several years. They were very young when they were married, and her first feeling of resentment toward her own family for pressing on the marriage had at the outset somewhat embittered her against her young husband. But this had gradually worn away, and Felicita had never been so near loving him heartily and deeply as during the last year or two, when it was evident that his attachment to her was as loyal and as tender as ever. He had almost won her, when he staked all and lost all.

For now, she asked herself, what was the worth of all this religion, which presented so fair a face to her? She had a delicate sense of honor and truthfulness, which never permitted her to swerve into any byways of expediency or convenience. What use was Roland's religion without truthfulness and honor? She said to herself that there was no excuse for him even feeling tempted to deal with another man's property. It ought to have been as impossible to him as it was impossible to her to steal goods from a tradesman's counter. Was it possible to serve God—and Roland professed to serve Him—yet cheat his fellow-men? The service of God itself must then be a vanity—a mere bubble, like all the other bubbles of life.

It had never been her habit to speak out her thoughts, even to her husband. Speech seemed an inefficient and blundering medium of communication, and she found it easier to write than to talk. There was a natural taciturnity about her which sealed her lips, even when her children were prattling to her. Only in writing could she give expression to the multitude of her thoughts within her; and her letters were charming, and of exceeding interest. But in this great crisis in her life she could not write. She would sit for hours vainly striving to arouse her languid brain. It seemed to her that she had lost this gift also in the utter ruin that had overtaken her.

Felicita's white, silent, benumbed grief, accepting the conviction of her husband's guilt with no feminine contradicting or loud lamenting, touched Mr. Clifford with more pity than he felt for Madame, who bore her son's mysterious absence with a more simple and natural sorrow. There was something irritating to him in the fact that Roland's mother ignored the accusation he made against him. But when Roland had been away three months, and the police authorities had given up all expectation of discovering anything by watching his home and family, Mr. Clifford felt that it was time something should be arranged which would deliver Felicita from her voluntary imprisonment.

"Why do you not go away?" he asked her; "you cannot continue to live mewed up here all your days. If Roland should be found, it would be better for you not to be in Riversborough. And I for one have given up the expectation that he will be found; the only chance is that he may return and give himself up. Go to some place where you are not known. There is Scarborough; take Madame and the children there for a few months, and then settle in London for the winter. Nobody will know you in London."

"But how can we leave this house?" she said, with a gleam of light in her sad eyes.

"Let me come in just as it is," he answered. "I will pay you a good rent for it, and you can take a part of the furniture to London, to make your new dwelling there more like home. It would be a great convenience to me, and it would be the best thing for you, depend upon it. If Roland returns he never will live here again."

"No, he could never do that," she said, sighing deeply. "Mr. Clifford, sometimes I think he must be dead."

"I have thought so too," he replied gravely; "and if it were so, it would be the salvation of you and your children. There would be no public trial and conviction, and though suspicion might always rest upon his memory, he would not be remembered for long. Justice would be defrauded, yet on the whole I should rejoice for your sake to hear that he was dead."

Felicita's lips almost echoed the words. Her heart did so, though it smote her as she recollected his passionate love for her. But Mr. Clifford's speech sank deeply into her mind, and she brooded over it incessantly. Roland's death meant honor and fair fame for herself and her children; his life was perpetual shame and contempt to them.

It was soon settled that they must quit Riversborough; but though Felicita welcomed the change, and was convinced it would be the best thing to do, Madame grieved sorely over leaving the only home which had been hers, except the little manse in the Jura, where her girlhood had passed swiftly and happily away. She had brought with her the homely, thrifty ways in which she had been trained, and every spot in her husband's dwelling had been taken under her own care and supervision. Her affections had rooted themselves to the place, and she had never dreamed of dying anywhere else than among the familiar scenes which had surrounded her for more than thirty years. The change too could not be made without her consent, for her marriage settlement was secured upon the house, and her husband had left to her the right of accepting or refusing a tenant. To leave the familiar, picturesque old mansion, and to carry away with her only a few of the household treasures, went far to break her heart.

"It is where my husband intended for me to live and die," she moaned to Phebe Marlowe; "and, oh, if I go away I can never fancy I see him sitting in his own chair as he used to do, at the head of the table, or by the fire. I have not altogether lost him, though he's gone, as long as I can think of how he used to come in and go out of this room, always with a smile for me. But if I go where he never was, how can I think I see him there? And my son will be angry if we go; he will come back, and clear up all this mystery, and he will think we went away because we thought he had done evil. Ought we not to come home again after we have been to Scarborough?"

"I think Mrs. Sefton will die if she stays here," said Phebe. "It is necessary for her to make this change; and you'd rather go with her and the children than live here alone without them."

"Oh, yes, yes!" answered Madame; "I cannot leave my little Felix and Hilda, or Felicita: she is my son's dear wife. But he will come home some day, and we can return then; you hope so, don't you, Phebe?"

"If God pleases!" said Phebe, sighing.

"In truth, if God pleases!" repeated Madame.

When the last hour came in which Phebe could see Roland's wife, she sought for her in her study, where she was choosing the books to be sent after her. In the very words in which Roland had sent his message he delivered it to Felicita. The cold, sad, marble-like face did not change, though her heart gave a throb of disappointment and anguish as the dread hope that he was no longer alive died out of it.

"I will meet him there," she said. But she asked Phebe no questions, and did not tell her where she was to meet her husband.



CHAPTER XI.

OLD MARLOWE.

Life had put on for Phebe a very changed aspect. The lonely farmstead on the uplands had been till now a very happy and tranquil home. She had had no sorrow since her mother died when she was eight years of age, too young to grieve very sorely. On the other hand, she was not so young as to require a woman's care, and old Marlowe had made her absolute mistress of the little home. His wife, a prudent, timid woman, had always repressed his artistic tendencies, preferring the certainty of daily bread to the vague chances of gaining renown and fortune. Old Marlowe, so marred and imperfect in his physical powers, had submitted to her shrewd, ignorant authority, and earned his living and hers by working on his little farm and going out occasionally as a carpenter. But when she was gone, and his little girl's eyes only were watching him at his work, and the child's soul delighted in all the beautiful forms his busy hands could fashion, he gave up his out-door toil, and, with all the pent-up ardor of the lost years, he threw himself absorbingly into the pleasant occupation of the present. Though he mourned faithfully for his wife, the woman who had given to him Phebe, he felt happier and freer without her.

Phebe's girlhood also had been both free and happy. All the seasons had been sweet to her: dear to her was "the summer, clothing the general earth with greenness," and the winter, when "the redbreast sits and sings be-twixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch of the mossy apple-tree." She had listened to "the eave-drops falling in the trances of the blast," and seen them "hang in silent icicles, quietly shining to the quiet moon." There had been no change in nature unnoticed or unbeloved by her. The unbroken silence reigning around her, heightened by the mute speech between herself and her father, which needed eyes only, not lips, had grown so familiar as to be almost dear to her, in spite of her strong delight in fellowship with others. The artistic temperament she had inherited from her father, which very early took vivid pleasure in expressing itself in color as well as in form, had furnished her with an occupation of which she could never tire. As long as there was light in the sky, long after the sun had gone down, in the lingering twilight, loath to forsake the uplands, she was at her canvas catching the soft gray tones, and dim-colored tints, and clearer masses of foliage, which only the evening could show.

To supply her need of general companionship there had been so full and satisfying a sense of friendship between herself and the household at the Old Bank at Riversborough that one day spent with them gave her thought for a month. Every word uttered by Roland and Felicita was treasured up in her memory and turned over in her mind for days after. Madame's simple and cheerful nature made her almost like a mother to the simple and cheerful country girl; and Felix and Hilda had been objects of the deepest interest to her from the days of their birth. But it was Roland, who had known her best and longest, to whom she owed the direction and cultivation of her tastes and intellect, who had been almost like a god to her in her childhood; it was he who dominated over her simple heart the most. He was to Phebe so perfect that she had never imagined that there could be a fault in him.

There is one token to us that we are meant for a higher and happier life than this, in the fact that sorrow and sin always come upon us as a surprise. Happy days do not astonish us, and the goodness of our beloved ones awakens no amazement. But if a sorrow comes we cry aloud to let our neighbors know something untoward has befallen us; and if one we love has sinned, we feel as if the heavens themselves were darkened.

It was so with Phebe Marlowe. All her earthly luminaries, the greater lights and the lesser lights, were under an eclipse, and a strange darkness had fallen upon her. For the first time in her life she found herself brooding over the sin of one who had been her guide, her dearest friend, her hero. From the time when as a child she had learned to look up to him as the paragon of all perfection, until now, as a girl on the verge of womanhood, she had offered up to him a very pure and maidenly worship. There was no one else whom she could love as much; for her dumb and deaf father she loved in quite a different manner—with more of pity and compassion than of admiration. Roland too had sometimes talked with her, especially while she was a child, about God and Christ; and she had regarded him as a spiritual director. Now her guide was lost in the dense darkness. There was no sure example for her to follow.

She had told her father he would never see her smile again if Roland Sefton was taken to jail. There had been, of course, an implied promise in this, but the promise was broken. Old Marlowe looked in vain for the sweet and merry smiles that had been used to play upon her face. She was too young and too unversed in human nature to know how jealously her father would watch her, with inward curses on him who had wrought the change. When he saw her stand for an hour or more, listlessly gazing with troubled, absent eyes across the wide-spreading moor, with its broad sweep of deep-purpled bloom, and golden gorse, and rich green fern, yet taking no notice, nor hastening to fix the gorgeous hues upon her canvas while the summer lasted; and when he watched her in the long dusk of the autumn evenings sit motionless in the chimney corner opposite to him, her fingers lying idly on her lap instead of busily prattling some merry nonsense to him, and with a sad preoccupation in her girlish face; then he felt that he had received his own death-blow, and had no more to live for.

The loss of his hard-earned money had taken a deeper hold upon him than a girl so young as Phebe could imagine. For what is money to a young nature but the merest dross, compared with the love and faith it has lavished upon some fellow-mortal? While she was mourning over the shipwreck of all her best affections, old Marlowe was brooding over his six hundred pounds. They represented so much to him, so many years of toil and austere self-denial. He had risen early, and late taken rest, and eaten the bread of carefulness. His grief was not all ignoble, for it was for his girl he grieved most; his wonderful child, so much more gifted than the children of other men, whom nature had treated more kindly than himself, men who could hear and speak, but whose daughters were only commonplace creatures. The money was hers, not his; and it was too late now for him to make up the heavy loss. The blow which had deprived him of the fruits of his labor seemed to have incapacitated him for further work.

Moreover, Phebe was away oftener than usual: gone to the house of the spoiler. Nor did she come home, as she had been wont to do, with radiant eyes, and a soft, sweet smile coming and going, and many a pleasant piece of news to tell off on her nimble fingers. She returned with tear-stained eyelids and a downcast air, and was often altogether silent as to the result of the day's absence.

He strove, notwithstanding a haunting dread of failure, to resume his old occupation. Doggedly every morning he put on his brown paper cap, and went off to his crowded little workshop, but with unequal footsteps, quite unlike his former firm tread. But it would not do. He stood for hours before his half-shaped blocks of oak, with birds and leaves and heads partly traced upon them; but he found himself powerless to complete his own designs. Between him and them stood the image of Phebe, a poverty-stricken, work-worn woman, toiling with her hands, in all weathers, upon their three or four barren fields, which were now the only property left to him. It had been pleasant to him to see her milk the cows, and help him to fetch in the sheep from the moors; but until now he had been able to pay for the rougher work on the farmstead. His neighbor, Samuel Nixey, had let his laborers do it for him, since he had kept his own hands and time for his artistic pursuit. But he could afford this no longer, and the thought of the next winter's work which lay before him and Phebe harassed him terribly.

"Father," she said to him one evening, after she had been at Riversborough, "they are all going away—Mrs. Sefton, and Madame, and the children. They are going Scarborough, and after that to London, never to come back. I shall not see them again."

"Thank God!" thought the dumb old man, and his eyes gleamed brightly from under their thick gray eyebrows. But he did not utter the words, so much less easy was it for his fingers to betray his thoughts than it would have been for his lips. And Phebe did not guess them.

"Is there any news of him?" he asked.

"Not a word," she answered. "Mr. Clifford has almost given it up. He is an unforgiving man, an awful man."

"No, no; he is a just man," said old Marlowe; "he wants nothing but his own again, like me, and that a scoundrel should not get off scot free. I want my money back; it's not money merely, but my years, and my brain, and my love for thee, and my power to work: that's what he has robbed me of. Let me have my money back, and I'll forgive him."

"Poor father!" said Phebe aloud, with a little sob. How easy it seemed to her to forgive a wrong that could be definitely stated at six hundred pounds! All her inward grief was that Roland had fallen—he himself. If by a whole sacrifice of herself she could have reinstated him in the place he had forfeited, she would not have hesitated for an instant. But no sacrifice she could make would restore him.

"Does Mrs. Sefton know what he has done?" inquired her father.

She nodded only in reply.

"Does she believe him innocent?" he asked.

"No," answered Phebe.

"And Madame, his mother?" he pursued.

"No, no, no! she cannot believe him guilty," she replied; "she thinks he could free himself, if he would only come home. She is far happier than Mrs. Sefton or me. I would lay down my life to have him true and honest and good again, as he used to be. I feel as if I was in a miserable dream."

They were sitting together outside their cottage-door, with the level rays of the setting sun shining across the uplands upon them, and the fresh air of the evening breathing upon their faces. It was an hour they both loved, but neither of them felt its beauty and tranquillity now.

"You love him next to me?" asked old Marlowe.

"Next to you, father," she repeated.

But the subtle jealousy in the father's heart whispered that his daughter loved these grand friends of hers more than himself. What could he be to her, deaf mute that he was? What could he do for her? All he had done had been swept away by the wrong-doing of this fine gentleman, for whom she was willing to lay down her life. He looked at her with wistful eyes, longing to hold closer, swifter communication with her than could be held by their slow finger-speech. How could he ever make her know all the love and pride pent up in his voiceless heart? Phebe, in her girlish, blind preoccupation, saw nothing of his eager, wistful gaze, did not even notice the nervous trembling of his stammering fingers; and the old man felt thrown back upon himself, in more utter loneliness of spirit than his life had ever experienced before. Yet he was not so old a man, for he was little over sixty, but his hard life of incessant toil and his isolation from his fellow-creatures had aged him. This bitter calamity added many years to his actual age, and he began to realize that his right hand was forgetting its cunning, his eye for beauty was growing dim, and his craft failing him. The long, light summer days kept him for a while from utter hopelessness. But as the autumn winds began to moan and mutter round the house he told himself that his work was done, and that soon Phebe would be a friendless and penniless orphan.

"I ought not to have let Roland Sefton go," he thought to himself; "if I'd done my duty he would have been paying for his sin now, and maybe there would have been some redress for us that lost by him. None of his people will come to poverty like my Phebe. I could have held up my head if I had not helped him to escape from punishment."



CHAPTER XII.

RECKLESS OF LIFE.

If old Marlowe, or Mr. Clifford himself, could have followed Roland Sefton during his homeless wanderings, their rigorous sense of justice would have been satisfied that he was not escaping punishment, though he might elude the arbitrary penalty of the law.

As the summer advanced, and the throng of yearly tourists poured into the playground of Europe from every country, but especially from England, he was driven away from all the towns and villages where he might by chance be recognized by some fellow-countryman. Up into the mountain pastures he retreated, where he rambled from one chalet to another, sleeping on beds of fodder, with its keen night air piercing through the apertures of the roof and walls, yet bringing with it those intolerable stenches which exhale from the manure and mire lying ankle-deep round each picturesque little hut. The yelping of the watch-dogs; the snoring of the tired herdsmen lying within arm's length of him; the shrill tinkling of cow-bells, musical enough by day and in the distance, but driving sleep away too harshly; the sickness and depression produced by unwholesome food, and the utter compulsory abandonment of all his fastidious and dainty personal habits, made his mere bodily life intolerable to him. He had borne something like these discomforts and privations for a day or two at a time, when engaged in Alpine climbing, but that he should be forced to live a life compared with which that of an Irish bog-trotter was decent and civilized, was a daily torment to him.

It is true that during the long hours of daylight he wandered among the most sublime scenery. Sometimes he scaled solitary peaks and looked down upon far-stretching landscapes below him, with broad dead rivers of glaciers winding between the high and terrible masses of snow-clad rocks, and creeping down into peaceful valleys, where little living streams of silvery gray wandered among chalets looking no larger than the rocks strewn around them, with a tiny church in their midst lifting up its spire of glittering metal with a kind of childish confidence and exultation. Here and there in deep sunken hollows lay small tarns, black as night, and guilty looking, with precipices overhanging them fringed with pointed pine-trees, which sought in vain to mirror themselves in those pitch-dark waters. And above them all, gazing down in silent greatness, rose the snow-mountains, very cold, whiter than any other whiteness on earth, pure and stainless, and apparently as unapproachable in their far-off loveliness as the deep blue of the pure sky behind them.

But there was something unutterably awful to Roland Sefton in this sublimity. A bad man, whose ear has never heard the voice of Nature, and whose eye is blind to her ineffable beauty, may dwell in such places and not be crushed by them. The dull herdsmen, thinking only of their cattle and of the milking to be done twice a day, might live their own stupid, commonplace lives there. The chance visitor who spent a few hours in scaling difficult cliffs would perhaps catch a brief and fleeting sense of their awfulness, only too quickly dissipated by the unwonted toil and peril of his situation. But Roland Sefton felt himself exiled to their ice-bound solitudes, cut off from all companionship, and attended only by an accusing conscience.

Morning after morning, when his short and feverish night was ended, he went out in the early dawn while all the valleys below were still slumbering in darkness, self-driven into the wilderness of rock and snow rising above the wretched chalets. With coarse food sufficient for the wants of the day he strayed wherever his aimless footsteps led him. It was seldom that he stayed more than a night or two in the same herdsman's hut. When he was well out of the track of tourists he ventured down into the lower villages now and then, seeking a few days of comparative comfort. But some rumor, or the arrival of some chance traveller more enterprising and investigating than the mass, always drove him away again. There was no peace for him, either in the high Alps or the most secluded valleys.

How could there be peace while memory and conscience were gnawing at his heart? In a dreary round his thoughts went back to the first beginnings of the road that had led him hither; with that vague feeling which all of us have when retracing the irrevocable past, as if by some mighty effort of our will we could place ourselves at the starting-point again and run our race—oh, how differently!

Roland could almost fix the date when he had first wished that Mr. Clifford's bonds, bequeathed to him, were already his own. He recollected the very day when old Marlowe had asked him to invest his money for him in some safe manner for Phebe's benefit, and how he had persuaded himself that nothing could be safer than to use it for his own purposes, and to pay a higher interest than the old man could get elsewhere. What he had done for him had been still easier to do for other clients—ignorant men and women who knew nothing of business, and left it all to him, gratefully pleased with the good interest he paid them. The web had been woven with almost invisible threads at the first, but the finest thread among them was a heavy cable now.

But the one thought that haunted him, never leaving him for an instant in these terrible solitudes, was the thought of Felicita. His mother he could forget sometimes, or remember her with a dewy tenderness at his heart, as if he could feel her pitiful love clinging to him still; and his children he dreamed of at times in a day-dream, as playing merrily without him, in the blissful ignorance of childhood. But Felicita, who did not love him as his mother did, and could not remain in ignorance of his crime! Was she not something like these pure, distant snowy pinnacles, inapproachable and repellent, with icy-cold breath which petrified all lips that drew too near to them? And he had set a stain upon that purity as white as the driven snow. The name he had given to her was tarnished, and would be publicly dishonored if he failed in evading the penalty he merited. His death alone could save her from notorious and intolerable disgrace.

But though he was reckless of his life, he could not bring himself to be guilty of suicide. Death was wooing him in many forms, day by day, to seek refuge with him. When his feet slipped among the yawning crevasses of the glaciers, the smallest wilful negligence would have buried him in their blue depths. The common impulse to cast himself down the precipices along whose margin he crept had only to be yielded to, and all his earthly woe would be over. Even to give way to the weary drowsiness that overtook him at times as the sun went down, and the night fell upon him far away from shelter, might have soothed him into the slumber from which there is no awaking. But he dared not. He was willing enough to die, if dying had been all. But he believed in the punishment of sin here, or hereafter; in the dealing out of a righteous judgment to every man, whether he be good or evil.

As the autumn passed by, and the mountain chalets were shut up, the cattle and the herdsmen descending to the lower pastures, Roland Sefton was compelled to descend too. There was little chance of encountering any one who knew him at this late season; yet there were still stragglers lingering among the Alps. But when he saw himself again in a looking-glass, his face burned and blistered with the sun, and now almost past recognition, and his ragged hair and beard serving him better than any disguise, he was no longer afraid of being detected. He began to wonder in mingled hope and dread whether Felicita would come out to seek him. The message he had sent to her by Phebe could be interpreted by her alone. Would she avail herself of it to find him out? Or would she shrink from the toil and pain and danger of quitting England? A few weeks more would answer the question.

Sometimes he was overwhelmed with terror lest she should be watched, and her movements tracked, and that behind her would come the pursuers he had so successfully evaded. At other times an unutterable heart-sickness possessed him to see her once more, to hear her voice, to press his lips, if he dared, to her pale cheeks; to discover whether she would suffer him to hold her in his arms for one moment only. He longed to hear from her lips what had happened at home since he fled from it six months ago; what she had done, and was going to do, supposing that he were not arrested and brought to justice. Would she forgive him? would she listen to his pleas and explanations? He feared that she would hate him for the shame he had brought upon her. Yet there was a possibility that she might pity him, with a pity so much akin to love as that with which the angels look down upon sinful human beings.

Every day brought the solution of his doubts nearer. The rains of autumn had begun, and fell in torrents, driving him to any shelter he could find, to brood there hour after hour upon these hopes and fears. The fog and thick clouds hid the mountains, and all the valleys lay forlorn and cold under clinging veils of mist, through which the few brown leaves left upon the trees hung limp and dying on the bare branches. The villagers were settling down to their winter life; and though along the frequented routes a few travellers were still passing to and fro, the less known were deserted. It was safe now to go down to Engelberg, where, if ever again except as a prisoner in the hands of justice, he would see Felicita.

Impatient to anticipate the day on which he might again see her, he reached Engelberg a week before the appointed time. The green meadows and the forests of the little valley were hidden in mist and rain, and the towering dome of the Titlis was folded from sight in dense clouds, with only a cold gleam now and then as its snowy summit glanced through them for a minute. The innumerable waterfalls were swollen, and fell with a restless roar through the black depths of the forests. The daylight was short, for the sun rose late behind the encircling mountains, and hastened to sink again below them. But the place where he had first met Felicita was dear to him, though dark and gloomy with the cloudy days. He hastened to the church where his eyes had fallen upon the young, silent, absorbed girl so many years ago; and here, where the sun was shining fitfully for a brief half hour, he paced up and down the aisles, wondering what the coming interview would bring. Day after day he lingered there, with the loud chanting of the monks ringing in his ears, until the evening came when he said to himself, "To-morrow I shall see her once more."



CHAPTER XIII.

SUSPENSE.

Roland Sefton did not sleep that night. As the time drew near for Felicita to act upon his message to her, he grew more desponding of her response to it; yet he could not give up the feeble hope still flickering in his heart. If she did not come he would be a hopeless outcast indeed; yet if she came, what succor could she bring to him? He had not once cherished the idea that Mr. Clifford would forbear to prosecute him; yet he knew well that if he could be propitiated, the other men and women who had claims upon him would be easily satisfied and appeased. But how many things might have happened during the long six months, which had seemed almost an eternity to him. It was not impossible that Mr. Clifford might be dead. If so, and if a path was thus open to him to re-enter life, how different should his career be in the future! How warily would he walk; with what earnest penitence and thorough uprightness would he order all his ways! He would be what he had only seemed to be hitherto: a man following Christ, as his forefathers had done.

He was staying at a quiet inn in the village, and as soon as daybreak came he started down the road along which Felicita must come, and waited at the entrance of the valley, four miles from the little village. The road was bad, for the heavy rains had washed much of it away, and it had been roughly repaired by fir-trees laid along the broken edges; but it was not impassable, and a one-horse carriage could run along it safely. The rain had passed away, and the sun was shining. The high mountains and the great rocks were clear from base to summit. If she came to-day there was a splendid scene prepared for her eyes. Hour after hour passed by, the short autumnal day faded into the dusk, and the dusk slowly deepened into the blackness of night. Still he waited, late on into the night, till the monastery bells chimed for the last time; but there was no sign of her coming.

The next day passed as that had done. Felicita, then, had deserted him! He felt so sure of Phebe that he never doubted that she had not received his message. He had left only one thread of communication between himself and home—a slender thread—and Felicita had broken it. There was now no hope for him, no chance of learning what had befallen all his dear ones, unless he ran the risk of discovery, and ventured back to England.

But for Felicita and his children, he said to himself, it would be better to go back, and pay the utmost penalty he owed to the broken laws of his country. No hardships could be greater than those he had already endured; no separation from companionship could be more complete. The hard labor he would be doomed to perform would be a relief. His conscience might smite him less sharply and less ceaselessly if he was suffering the due punishment for his sin, in the society of his fellow-criminals. Dartmoor Prison would be better for him than his miserable and degrading freedom.

Still, as long as he could elude publicity and preserve his name from notoriety, the burden would not fall upon Felicita and his children. His mother would not shrink from bearing her share of any burden of his. But he must keep out of the dock, lest their father and husband should be branded as a convict.

A dreary round his thoughts ran. But ever in the centre of the circling thoughts lay the conviction that he had lost his wife and children forever. Whether he dragged out a wretched life in concealment, or was discovered, or gave himself up to justice, Felicita was lost to him. There were some women—Phebe Marlowe was one—who could have lived through the shame of his conviction and the dreary term of his imprisonment, praying to God for her husband, and pitying him with a kind of heavenly grace, and at the end of the time met him at the prison door, and gone out with him, tenderly and faithfully, to begin a new life in another country. But Felicita was not one of these women. He could never think of her as pardoning a transgression like his, though committed for her sake. Even now she would not stoop so low as to seek a meeting with one who deserved a penal punishment.

Night had set in, and he was trudging along the road, still heavy with recent rains, though the sky above was hung with glittering stars, and the crystal snow on Titlis shone against the deep blue depths, casting a wan light over the valley. Suddenly upon the stillness there came the sound of several voices, and a shrill yodel, pitched in a key that rang through the village, to call attention to the approaching party. It was in advance of him, nearer to Engelberg; yet though he had been watching the route from Stans all day, and was satisfied that Felicita could not have entered the valley unseen by himself, the hope flashed through him that she was before him, belated by the state of the roads. He hurried on, seeing before him a small group of men carrying lanterns. But in their midst they bore a rude litter, made of a gate taken hastily off the hinges. They passed out of sight behind a house as he caught sight of the litter, and for a minute or two he could not follow them, from the mere shock of dread lest the litter held her. Then he hurried on, and reached the hotel door as the procession marched into the hall and laid their burden cautiously down.

"An accident?" said the landlord.

"Yes," answered one of the peasants; "we found him under Pfaffenwand. He must have been coming from Engstlensee Alp; how much farther the good God alone knows. The paths are slippery this wet weather, and he had no guide, or there was no guide to be seen."

"That must be searched into," said the landlord; "is he dead?"

"No, no," replied two or three together.

"He has spoken twice," continued the peasant who had answered before, "and groaned much. But none of us knew what he said. He is dying, poor fellow!"

"English?" asked the landlord, looking down on the scarred face and eager eyes of the stranger, who lay silent on the litter, glancing round uneasily at the faces about him.

"Some of us would have known French, or German, or Italian," was the reply, "but not one of us knows English."

"Nor I," said the landlord; "and our English speaker went away last week, over the St. Gothard to Italy for the winter. Send round, Marie," he went on, speaking to his wife, "and find out any one in Engelberg who knows English. See! The poor fellow is trying to say something now."

"I can speak English," said Roland, pushing his way in amid the crowd and kneeling down beside the litter, on which a rough bed of fir pine-branches had been made. The unknown face beneath his eyes was drawn with pain, and the gaze that met his was one of earnest entreaty.

"I am dying," he murmured; "don't let them torture me. Only let me be laid on a bed to die in peace."

"I will take care of you," said Roland in his pleasant and soothing voice, speaking as tenderly as if he had been saying "God bless you!" to Felix in his little cot; "trust yourself to me. They shall do for you only what I think best."

The stranger closed his eyes with an expression of relief, and Roland, taking up one corner of the litter, helped to carry it gently into the nearest bedroom. He was gifted with something of a woman's softness of touch, and with a woman's delicate sympathy with pain; and presently, though not without some moans and cries, the injured man was resting peacefully on a bed: not unconscious, but looking keenly from face to face on the people surrounding him.

"Are you English?" he asked, looking at Roland's blistered face and his worn peasant's dress.

"Yes," he answered.

"Is there any surgeon here?" he inquired.

"No English surgeon," replied Roland. "I do not know if there is one even at Lucerne, and none could come to you for many hours. But there must be some one at the monastery close by, if not in the village—"

"No, no!" he interrupted, "I shall not live many hours; but promise me—I am quite helpless as you see—promise me that you will not let any village doctor pull me about."

"They are sometimes very skilful," urged Roland, "and you do not know that you must really die."

"I knew it as I was slipping," he answered; "at the first moment I knew it, though I clutched at the very stones to keep me from falling. Why! I was dead when they found me; only the pain of being pulled about brought me back to life. I'm not afraid to die if they will let me die in peace."

"I will promise not to leave you," replied Roland; "and if you must die, it shall be in peace."

That he must die, and was actually dying, was affirmed by all about him. One of the brothers from the monastery, skilled in surgery, came in unrecognized as a doctor by the stranger, and shook his head hopelessly when he saw him, telling Roland to let him do whatever he pleased so long as he lived, and to learn all he could from him during the hours of the coming night. There was no hope, he said; and if he had not been found by the peasants he would have been dead now. Roland must ask if he was a good Catholic or a heretic. When the monk heard that he was a heretic and needed none of the consolations of the Church, he bade him farewell kindly, and went his way.

Roland Sefton sat beside the dying man all the night, while he lingered from hour to hour: free from pain at times, at others restless and racked with agony. He wandered a little in delirium, and when his brain was clear he had not much to say.

"Have you no message to send to your friends?" inquired Roland, in one of these lucid intervals.

"I have no friends," he answered, "and no money. It makes death easier."

"There must be some one who would care to hear of you," said Roland.

"They'll see it in the papers," he replied. "No, I come from India, and was going to England. I have no near relations, and there is no one to care much. 'Poor Austin,' they'll say; 'he wasn't a bad fellow.' That's all. You've been kinder to me than anybody I know. There's about fifty pounds in my pocket-book. Bury me decently and take the rest."

He dozed a little, or was unconscious for a few minutes. His sunburnt face, lying on the white pillow, still looked full of health and the promise of life, except when it was contracted with pain. There was no weakness in his voice or dimness in his eye. It seemed impossible to believe that this strong young man was dying.

"I lost my valise when I fell," he said, opening his eyes again and speaking in a tranquil tone; "but there was nothing of value in it. My money and my papers are in my pocket-book. Let me see you take possession of it."

He watched Roland search for the book in the torn coat on the chair beside him, and his eyes followed its transfer to his breast-pocket under his blue blouse.

"You are an English gentleman, though you look a Swiss peasant," he said; "you are poor, perhaps, and my money will be of use to you. It is the only return I can make to you. I should like you to write down that I give it to you, and let me sign the paper."

"Presently," said Roland; "you must not exert yourself. I shall find your name and address here?"

"I have no address; of course I have a name," he answered; "but never mind that now. Tell me, what do you think of Christ? Does He indeed save sinners?"

"Yes," said Roland reluctantly; "He says, 'I came to seek and to save that which was lost.' Those are His own words."

"Kneel down quickly," murmured the dying man. "Say 'Our Father!' so that I can hear every word. My mother used to teach it to me."

"And she is dead?" said Roland.

"Years ago," he gasped.

Roland knelt down. How familiar, with what a touch of bygone days, the attitude came to him; how homely the words sounded! He had uttered them innumerable times; never quite without a feeling of their sacredness and sweetness. But he had not dared to take them into his lips of late. His voice faltered, though he strove to keep it steady and distinct, to reach the dying ears that listened to him. The prayer brought to him the picture of his children kneeling, morning and evening, with the self-same petitions. They had said them only a few hours ago, and would say them again a few hours hence. Even the dying man felt there was something more than mere emotion for him expressed in the tremulous tones of Roland Sefton's voice. He held out his hand to him when he had finished, and grasped his warmly.

"God bless you!" he said. But he was weary, and his strength was failing him. He slumbered again fitfully, and his mind wandered. Now and then during the rest of the night he looked up with a faint smile, and his lips moved inarticulately. He thought he had spoken, but no sound disturbed the unbroken silence.



CHAPTER XIV.

ON THE ALTAR STEPS.

It was as the bells of the Abbey rang for matins that the stranger died. For a few minutes Roland remained beside him, and then he called in the women to attend to the dead, and went out into the fresh morning air. It was the third day that the mountains had been clear from fog and cloud, and they stood out against the sky in perfect whiteness. The snow-line had come lower down upon the slopes, and the beautiful crystals of frost hung on the tapering boughs of the pine-trees in the forests about Engelberg. Here and there a few villagers were going toward the church, and almost unconsciously Roland followed slowly in their track.

The short service was over and the congregation was dispersing when he crossed the well-worn door-sill. But a few women, especially the late comers, were still scattered about praying mechanically, with their eyes wandering around them. The High Altar was deserted, but candles burning on it made a light in the dim place, and he listlessly sauntered up the centre aisle. A woman was kneeling on the steps leading up to it, and as the echo of his footsteps resounded in the quiet church she rose and looked round. It was Felicita! At that moment he was not thinking of her; yet there was no doubt or surprise in the first moment of recognition. The uncontrollable rapture of seeing her again arrested his steps, and he stood looking at her, with a few paces between them. It was plain that she did not know him.

How could she know him, he thought bitterly, in the rough blue blouse and coarse clothing and heavy hobnail boots of a Swiss peasant? His hair was shaggy and uncut, and the skin of his face was so peeled and blistered and scorched that his disguise was sufficient to conceal him even from his wife. Yet as he stood there with downcast head, as a devout peasant might have done before the altar, he saw Felicita make a slight but imperious sign to him to advance. She did not take a step toward him, but leaning against the altar rails she waited till he was near to her, within hearing. There Roland paused.

"Felicita," he said, not daring to draw closer to her.

"I am here," she answered, not looking toward him; her large, dark, mournful eyes lifted up to the cross above the altar, before which a lamp was burning, whose light was reflected in her unshed tears.

Neither of them spoke again for a while. It seemed as if there could be nothing said, so great was the anguish of them both. The man who had just died had passed away tranquilly, but they were drinking of a cup more bitter than death. Yet the few persons lingering over their morning devotions before the shrines in the side aisles saw nothing but a stranger looking at the painting over the altar, and a peasant kneeling on the lowest step deep in prayer.

"I come from watching a fellow-man die," he said at last; "would to God it had been myself!"

"Yes!" sighed Felicita, "that would have been best for us all."

"You wish me dead!" he exclaimed, in a tone of anguish.

"For the children's sake," she murmured, still looking away from him; "yes! and for the sake of our name, your father's name, and mine. I thought to bring honor to it, and you have brought flagrant dishonor to it."

"That can never be wiped away," he added.

"Never!" she repeated.

As if exhausted by these passionate words, they fell again into silence. The murmur of whispered prayers was about them, and the faint scent of incense floated under the arched roof. A gleam of morning light, growing stronger, though the sun was still far below the eastern mountains, glittered through a painted window, and threw a glow of color upon them. Roland saw her standing in its many-tinted brightness, but her wan and sorrowful face was not turned to look at him. He had not caught a glance from her yet. How vividly he remembered the first moment his eyes had ever beheld her, standing as she did now on these very altar steps, with uplifted eyes and a sweet seriousness on her young face! It was only a poor village church, but it was the most sacred spot in the whole world to him; for there he had met Felicita and received her image into his inmost heart. His ambition as well as his love had centred in her, the penniless daughter of the late Lord Riversford, an orphan, and dependent upon her father's brother and successor. But to Roland his wife Felicita was immeasurably dearer than the girl Felicita Riversford had been. All the happy days since he had won her, all the satisfied desires, all his successes were centred in her and represented by her. All his crime too.

"I have loved you," he cried, "better than the whole world."

There was no answer by word or look to his passionate words.

"I have loved you," he said, more sadly, "better than God."

"But you have brought me to shame!" she answered; "if I am tracked here—and who can tell that I am not?—and if you are taken and tried and convicted, I shall be the wife of the fraudulent banker and condemned felon, Roland Sefton. And Felix and Hilda will be his children."

"It is true," he groaned; "I could not escape conviction."

He buried his face in his hands, and rested them on the altar-rails. Now his bowed-down head was immediately beneath her eyes, and she looked down upon it with a mournful gaze; it could not have been more mournful if she had been contemplating his dead face lying at rest in his coffin. How was all this shame and misery for him and her to end?

"Felicita," he said, lifting up his head, and meeting the sorrowful farewell expression in her face, "if I could die it would be best for the children and you."

"Yes," she answered, in the sweet, too dearly loved voice he had listened to in happy days.

"I dare not open that door of escape for myself," he went on, "and God does not send death to me. But I see a way, a possible way. I only see it this moment; but whether it be for good or evil I cannot tell."

"Will it save us?" she asked eagerly.

"All of us," he replied. "This stranger, whose corpse I have just left—nobody knows him, and he has no friends to trouble about him—shall I give to him my name, and bury him as myself? Then I shall be dead to all the world, Felicita; dead even to you; but you will be saved. I too shall be safe in the grave, for death covers all sins. Even old Clifford will be satisfied by my death."

"Could it be done?" she asked breathlessly.

"Yes," he said; "if you consent it shall be done. For my own sake I would rather go back to England and deliver myself up to the law I have broken. But you shall decide, my darling. If I return you will be known as the wife of the convict Sefton. Say: shall I be henceforth dead forever to you and my mother and the children? Shall it be a living death for me, and deliverance and safety and honor for you all? You must choose between my infamy or my death."

"It must be," she answered, slowly yet without hesitation, looking away from him to the cross above the altar, "your death."

A shudder ran through her slight frame as she spoke, and thrilled through him as he listened. It seemed to them both as if they stood beside an open grave, on either side one, and parted thus. He stretched out his hand to her, and laid it on her dress, as if appealing for mercy; but she did not turn to him, or look upon him, or open her white lips to utter another word. Then there came more stir and noise in the church, footsteps sounded upon the pavement, and an inquisitive face peeped out of the vestry near the altar where they stood. It was no longer prudent to remain as they were, subject to curiosity and scrutiny. Roland rose from his knees, and without glancing again toward her, he spoke in a low voice of unutterable grief and supplication.

"Let me see you and speak to you once more," he said.

"Once more," she repeated.

"This evening," he continued, "at your hotel."

"Yes," she answered. "I am travelling under Phebe Marlowe's name. Ask for Mrs. Marlowe."

She turned away and walked slowly and feebly down the aisle; and he watched her, as he had watched the light tread of the young girl eleven years ago, passing through alternate sunshine and shadow. There was no sunshine now. Was it possible that so long a time had passed since then? Could it be true that for ten years she had been his wife, and that the tie between them was forever dissolved? From this day he was to be dead to her and to all the world. He was about to pass voluntarily into a condition of death amid life, as utterly bereft of all that had once been his as if the grave had closed over him. Roland Sefton was to exist no more.



CHAPTER XV.

A SECOND FRAUD.

Roland Sefton went back to the room in which the corpse of the stranger was now lying. The women were gone, and he turned down the sheet to look at the face of the man who was about to bear his name and the disgrace of his crime into the safe asylum of the grave. It was perfectly calm, with no trace of the night's suffering upon it; there was even a faint vestige of a smile about the mouth, as of one who sleeps well, and has pleasant dreams. He was apparently about Roland's own age, and a description given by strangers would not be such as would lead to any suspicion that there could have been a mistake as to identity. Roland looked long upon it before covering it up again, and then he sat down beside the bed and opened the pocket-book.

There were notes in it worth fifty pounds, but not many papers. There was a memorandum made here and there of the places he had visited, and the last entry was dated the day before at Engstlenalp. Roland knew every step of the road, and for a while he seemed to himself to be this traveller, starting from the little inn, not yet vacated by its peasant landlord, but soon to be left to icy solitude, and taking the narrow path along the Engstlensee, toiling up the Joch pass under the mighty Wendenstoecke and the snowy Titlis, clear of clouds from base to summit yesterday. The traveller must have had a guide with him, some peasant or herdsman probably, as far as the Truebsee Alp; for even in summer the route was difficult to find. The guide had put him on to the path for Engelberg, and left him to make his way along the precipitous slopes of the Pfaffenwand. All this would be discovered when an official inquiry was made into the accident. In the mean time it was necessary to invest this stranger with his own identity.

There were two or three well-worn letters in the pocket-book, but they contained nothing of importance. It seemed true, what the dying man had said, that there was no link of kinship or friendship binding him specially to his fellow-men. Roland opened his own pocket-book, and looked over a letter or two which he had carried about with him, one of them a childish note from Felix, preferring some simple request. His passport was there also, and his mother's portrait and those of the children, over which his eyes brooded with a hungry sorrow in his heart. He looked at them for the last time. But Felicita's portrait he could not bring himself to give up. She would be dead to him, and he to her. In England she would live among her friends as his widow, pitied, and comforted, and beloved. But what would the coming years bring to him? All that would remain to him of the past would be a fading photograph only.

So long he lingered over this mournful conflict that he was at last aroused from it by the entrance of the landlord, and the mayor and other officials, who had come to look at the body of the dead. Roland's pocket-book lay open on the bed, and he was still gazing at the portraits of his children. He raised his sunburnt face as they came in, and rose to meet them.

"This traveller," he said, "gave to me his pocket-book as I watched beside him last night. It is here, containing his passport, a few letters, and fifty pounds in notes, which he told me to keep, but which I wish to give to the commune."

"They must be taken charge of," said the mayor; "but we will look over them first. Did he tell you who he was?"

"The passport discloses that," answered Roland; "he desired only a decent funeral."

"Ah!" said the mayor, taking out the passport, "an English traveller; name Roland Sefton; and these letters, and these portraits—they will be enough for identification."

"He said he had no friends or family in England," pursued Roland, "and there is no address among his letters. He told me he came from India."

"Then there need be no delay about the interment," remarked the mayor, "if he had no family in England, and was just come from India. Bah! we could not keep him till any friends came from India. It is enough. We must make an inquiry; but the corpse cannot be kept above ground. The interment may take place as soon as you please, Monsieur."

"I suppose you will wish for some trifle as payment?" said the landlord, addressing Roland.

"No," he answered, "I only watched by him through the night; and I am but a passing traveller like himself."

"You will assist at the funeral?" he asked.

"If it can be to-morrow," replied Roland; "if not I must go on to Lucerne. But I shall come back to Engelberg. If it be necessary for me to stay, and the commune will pay my expenses, I will stay."

"Not necessary at all," said the mayor; "the accident is too simple, and he has no friends. Why should the commune lose by him?"

"There are the fifty pounds," suggested Roland.

"And there are the expenses!" said the mayor. "No, no. It is not necessary for you to stay; not at all. If you are coming back again to Engelberg it will be all right. You say you are coming back?"

"I am sure to come back to Engelberg," he answered, with gloomy emphasis.

For already Roland began to feel that he, himself, was dead, and a new life, utterly different from the old, was beginning for him. And this new life, beginning here, would often draw him back to its birth-place. There would be an attraction for him here, even in the humble grave where men thought they had buried Roland Sefton. It would be the only link with his former life, and it would draw him to it irresistibly.

"And what is your name and employment, my good fellow?" asked the mayor.

"Jean Merle," he answered promptly. "I am a wood-carver."

The deed he had only thought of an hour ago was accomplished, and there could be no undoing it. This passport and these papers would be forwarded to the embassy at Berne, where doubtless his name was already known as a fugitive criminal. He could not reclaim them, for with them he took up again the burden of his sin. He had condemned himself to a penalty and sacrifice the most complete that man could think of, or put into execution. Roland Sefton was dead, and his wife and children were set free from the degradation he had brought upon them.