"Ah, my boy!" he said, "and your father was not a bad man. I know how you are sitting in judgment upon him, as young people do, who do not know what it is to be sorely tempted. I judged him, and my son before him, as harshly as man could do. Remember we judge hardest where we love the most; there's selfishness in it. Our children, our fathers, must be better than other folk's children and fathers. Don't begin to reckon up your father's sins before you are thirty, and don't pass sentence till you're fifty. Judges ought to be old men."

Felix sat down near to the old man, whose chair was in the oriel window, on which the sun was shining warmly. There below him lay the garden where he had played as a child, with the river flowing swiftly past it, and the boat-house in the corner, from which his father and he had so often started for a pleasant hour or two on the rapid current. But he could never think of his father again without sorrow and shame.

"Sin hurts us most as it comes nearest to us," said old Mr. Clifford; "the crime of a Frenchman does not make our blood boil as the crime of an Englishman; our neighbor's sin is not half as black as our kinsman's sin. But when we have to look it in the face in a son, in a father, then we see the exceeding sinfulness of it. Why, Felix, you knew that men defrauded one another; that even men professing godliness were sometimes dishonest."

"I knew it," he answered, "but I never felt it before."

"And I never felt it till I saw it in my son," continued the old man, sadly; "but there are other sins besides dishonesty, of a deeper dye, perhaps, in the sight of our Creator. If Roland Sefton had met with a more merciful man than I am he might have been saved."

For a minute or two his white head was bowed down, and his wrinkled eyelids were closed, whilst Felix sat beside him as sorrowful as himself.

"I could not be merciful," he burst out with a sudden fierceness in his face and tone, "I could not spare him, because I had not spared my own son. I had let one life go down into darkness, refusing to stretch out so much as a little finger in help, though he was as dear to me as my own life; and God required me yet again to see a life perish because of my hardness of heart. I think sometimes if Roland had come and cast himself on my mercy, I should have pardoned him; but again I think my heart was too hard then to know what mercy was. But those two, Felix, my son Robert, who died of starvation in the streets of Paris, and your father, who perished on a winter's night in Switzerland, they are my daily companions. They sit down beside me here, and by the fireside, and at my solitary meals; and they watch beside me in the night. They will never leave me till I see them again, and confess my sin to them."

"It was not you alone whom my father wronged," said Felix, "there were others besides you who might have prosecuted him."

"Yes, but they were ignorant, simple men," replied Mr. Clifford, "they need never have known of his crime. All their money could have been replaced without their knowledge; it was of me Roland was afraid. If the time could come over again—and I go over and over it in my own mind all in vain—I would act altogether differently. I would make him feel to the utmost the sin and peril of his course; but I would keep his secret. Even Felicita should know nothing. It was partly my fault too. If I had fulfilled my duty, and looked after my affairs instead of dreaming my time away in Italy, your father, as the junior partner, could not have fallen into this snare. When a crime is committed the criminal is not the only one to be blamed. Consciously or unconsciously those about him have been helping by their own carelessness and indolence, by cowardice, by indifference to right and wrong. By a thousand subtle influences we help our brother to disobey God; and when he is found out we stand aloof and raise an outcry against him. God has made every one of us his brother's keeper."

"Then you too have forgiven him," said Felix, with a glowing sense of comfort in his heart.

"Forgiven him? ay!" he answered, "as he sits by me at the fireside, invisible to all but me, I say to him again and again in words inaudible to all but him:

'Even as I hope for pardon in that day, When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits, So be thou pardoned.'"

The tremulous, weak old voice paused, and the withered hands lay feebly on his knees as he looked out on the summer sky, seeing nothing of its brightness, for the thoughts and memories that were flocking to his brain. Felix's younger eyes caught every familiar object on which the sun was shining, and knitted them up for ever with the memory of that hour.

"God help me!" he cried, "I forgive my father too; but I have lost him. I never knew the real man."



CHAPTER VIII.

THE GRAVE AT ENGELBERG.

On the same August morning when Felix was riding up the long lovely lanes to Phebe Marlowe's little farmstead, Canon Pascal and Alice were starting by the earliest boat which left Lucerne for Stansstad, in the dewy coolness of the dawn. The short transit was quickly over, and an omnibus carried them into Stans, where they left their knapsacks to be sent on after them during the day. The long pleasant walk of fourteen miles to Engelberg lay before them, to be taken leisurely, with many a rest in the deep cool shades of the woods, or under the shadow of some great rock. The only impediment with which Alice burdened herself was a little green slip of ivy, which Felix had gathered from the walls of her country home, and which she had carried in a little flower-pot filled with English soil, to plant on his father's grave. It had been a sacred, though somewhat troublesome charge to her, as they had travelled from place to place, and she had not permitted any one to take the care of it off her hands. This evening, with her own hands, she was going to plant it upon the foreign grave of Roland Sefton; which had been so long neglected, and unvisited by those whom he had left behind him. That Felicita should never have made a pilgrimage to this sacred spot was a wonder to her; but that she should so steadily resist the wish of Felix to visit his father's resting-place, filled Alice's heart with grave misgivings for her own future happiness.

But she was not troubling herself with any misgivings to-day, as they journeyed onward and upward through the rich meadows and thick forests leading to the Alpine valley which lay under the snowy dome of the Titlis. Her father's enjoyment of the sweet solitude and changeful beauty of their pathway was too perfect for her to mar it by any mournful forebodings. He walked beside her under the arched aisles of the pine-woods bareheaded, singing snatches of song as joyously as a school-boy, or waded off through marshy and miry places in quest of some rare plant which ought to be growing there, splashing back to her farther on in the winding road, scarcely less happy if he had not found it than if he had. How could she be troubled whilst her father was treading on enchanted ground?

But the last time they allowed themselves to sit down to rest before entering the village, Canon Pascal's face grew grave, and his manner toward his daughter became more tender and caressing than usual. The secret which Phebe had told him of Roland Sefton had been pondered over these many weeks in his heart. If it had concerned Felix only he would have felt himself grieved at this story of his father's sin, but he knew too well it concerned Alice as closely. This little ivy-slip, so carefully though silently guarded through all the journey, had been a daily reminder to him of his girl's love for her old playfellow and companion. Though she had not told him of its destiny he had guessed it, and now as she screened it from the too direct rays of the hot sun it spoke to her of Felix, and to him of his father's crime.

He had no resolve to make his daughter miserable by raising obstacles to her marriage with Felix, who was truly as dear to him as his own sons. But yet, if he had only known this dishonest strain in the blood, would he, years ago, have taken Felix into his home, and exposed Alice to the danger of loving him? Felix was out of the way of temptation; there was no stream of money passing through his hands, and it would be hard and vile indeed for him to fall into any dishonest trickery. But it might be that his children, Alice's children, might tread in the steps of their forefather, Roland Sefton, and pursue the same devious course. Thieves breed thieves, it was said, in the lowest dregs of social life. Would there be some fatal weakness, some insidious improbity, in the nature of those descending from Roland Sefton?

It was a wrong against God, a faithless distrust of Him, he said to himself, to let these dark thoughts distress his mind, at the close of a day such as that which had been granted to him, almost as a direct and perfect gift from heaven itself. He looked into the sweet, tranquil face of his girl, and the trustful loving eyes which met his anxious gaze with so open and frank an expression; yet he could not altogether shake off the feeling of solicitude and foreboding which had fallen upon his spirit.

"Let us go on, and have a quiet dinner by ourselves," said Alice, at last, "and then we shall have all the cool of the evening to wander about as we please."

They left their resting-place, and walked on in silence, as if they were overawed by the snow-clad mountains and towering peaks hanging over the valley. A little way off the road they saw a poor and miserable hut, built on piles of stones, with deep, sheltering eaves, but with a broken roof, and no light except such as entered it by the door. In the dimness of the interior they just caught sight of a gray-headed man, sitting on the floor, with his face hidden on his knees. It was an attitude telling of deep wretchedness, and heaviness of heart; and though neither of them spoke of the glimpse they had had, they drew nearer to one another, and walked closely together until they reached the hotel.

It was still broad daylight, though the sun had sunk behind the lofty mountains when they strolled out again into the picturesque, irregular street of the village. The clear blue sky above them was of the color of the wild hyacinth, the simplest, purest blue, against which the pure and simple white of the snowy domes and pinnacles of the mountain ranges inclosing the valley stood out in sharp, bold outlines; whilst the dark green of the solemn pine-forests climbing up the steep slopes looked almost black against the pale grey peaks jutting up from among them, with silver lines of snow marking out every line and crevice in their furrowed and fretted architecture. Canon Pascal bared his head, as if he had been entering his beloved Abbey in Westminster.

"God is very glorious!" he said, in a low and reverent tone. "God is very good!"

In silence they sauntered on, with loitering steps, to the little cemetery, where lay the grave they had come to seek. They found it in a forlorn and deserted corner, but there was no trace of neglect about the grey unpolished granite of the cross that marked it. No weeds were growing around it, and no moss was gathering upon it; the lettering, telling the name, and age, and date of death, of the man who lay beneath it, was as clear as if it had just come from the chisel of the graver. The tears sprang to Alice's eyes as she stood before it with reverently bowed head, looking down on Roland Sefton's grave.

"Did you ever see him, father?" she asked, almost in a whisper.

"I saw him once," he answered, "at Riversdale Towers, when Felix was still only a baby. He was a finer and handsomer man than Felix will ever be; and there was more foreign blood in his veins, which gave him greater gaiety and simpler vivacity than Englishmen usually have. I remember how he watched over Felicita, and waited on her in an almost womanly fashion; and fetched his baby himself for us to see, carrying him in his own arms with the deft skill of a nurse. Felix is as tender-hearted, but he would not make a show of it so openly."

"Cousin Felicita must have loved him with her whole heart," sighed Alice, "yet if I were in her place, I should come here often; it would be the one place I loved to come to. She is a hard woman, father; hard, and bitter, and obstinate. Do you think Felix's father would have set himself against me as she has done?"

She turned to him, her sad and pensive face, almost the dearest face in the world to him; and he gazed into it with penetrating and loving eyes. Would it not be best to tell the child the secret this grave covered, here, by the grave itself? Better for her to know the truth concerning the dead, than cherish hard and unjust thoughts of the living. Even if Felicita consented, he could not let her marry Felix ignorant of the facts which Phebe had disclosed to him. Felix himself must know them some day; and was not this the hour and the place for revealing them to Alice?

"My darling," he said, "I know why Felicita never comes here, nor lets her children come; and also why she is at present opposed to the thought of Felix marrying. Roland Sefton, her husband, the unhappy man whose body lies here, was guilty of a crime; and died miserably while a fugitive from our country. His death consigned the crime to oblivion; no one remembered it against her and her children. But if he had lived he would have been a convict; and she, and Felix, and Hilda would have shared his ignominy. She feels that she must not suffer Felix to enter our family until she has told me this; and it is the mere thought and dread of such a disclosure that has made her ill. We must wait till her mind recovers its strength."

"What was it he had done?" asked Alice, with quivering lips.

"He had misappropriated a number of securities left in his charge," answered Canon Pascal, "Phebe says to the amount of over L10,000; most of it belonging to Mr. Clifford."

"Is that all?" cried Alice, the color rushing back again to her face, and the light to her eyes, "was it only money? Oh! I thought it was more dreadful than that. Why! we should never blame cousin Felicita because her husband misappropriated some securities belonging to old Mr. Clifford. And Felix is not to blame at all; how could he be? Poor Felix!"

"But, Alice," he said, with a half smile, "if, instead of being buried here, Roland Sefton had lived, and been arrested, and sent to a convict prison for a term of imprisonment, Felicita's life, and the life of her children, would have been altogether overshadowed by the disgrace and infamy of it. There could have been no love between you and Felix."

"It was a good thing that he died," she answered, looking down on the grave again almost gladly. "Does Felix know this? But I am sure he does not," she added quickly, and looking up with a heightened color into her father's face, "he is all honor, and truth, and unselfishness. He could not be guilty of a crime against any one."

"I believe in Felix; I love him dearly," her father said, "but if I had known of this I do not think I could have brought him up in my own home, with my own boys and girls. God knows it would have been a difficult point to settle; but it was not given to my poor wisdom to decide."

"I shall not love Felix one jot less," she said, "or reverence him less. If all his forefathers had been bad men I should be sure still that he was good. I never knew him do or say anything that was mean or selfish. My poor Felix! Oh, father! I shall love him more than ever now I know there is something in his life that needs pity. When he knows it he will come to me for comfort; and I will comfort him. His father shall hear me promise it by this grave here. I will never, never visit Roland Sefton's sin on his son; I will never in my heart think of it as a thing against him. And if all the world came to know it, I would never once feel a moment's shame of him."

Her voice faltered a little, and she knelt down on the parched grass at the foot of the cross, hiding her face in her hands. Canon Pascal laid his hand fondly on her bowed head; and then he left her that she might be alone with the grave, and God.



CHAPTER IX.

THE LOWEST DEEPS.

The miserable, delapidated hut at the entrance of Engelberg, with no light save that which entered by the doorway, had been Jean Merle's home since he had fixed his abode in the valley, drawn thither irresistibly by the grave which bore Roland Sefton's name. There was less provision for comfort in this dark hovel than in a monk's cell. A log of rough, unbarked timber from the forest was the only seat, and a rude framework of wood filled with straw or dry ferns was his bed. The floor was bare, except near the door, the upper half of which usually stood open, and here it was covered with fine chips of box and oak-wood, and the dust which fell from his busy graver, the tool which was never out of his fingers while the light served him. There was no more decoration then there was comfort; except that on the smoke-stained walls the mildew had pencilled out some strange and grotesque lines, as if some mural painting had mouldered into ruin there. Two or three English books alone, of the cheap continental editions, lay at one end of a clumsy shelf; with the few cooking utensils which were absolutely necessary, piled together on the other. There was a small stove in one corner of the hovel, where a handful of embers could be seen at times, like the eye of some wild creature lurking in the deep gloom.

Jean Merle, though still two or three years under fifty, was looked upon by his neighbors as being a man of great, though unknown age. Yet, though he stooped in the shoulders a little, and walked with his head bent down, he was not infirm, nor had he the appearance of infirmity. His long mountain expeditions kept his muscles in full force and activity. But his grey face was marked with many lines, so fine as to be seen only at close quarters; yet on the whole forming a wrinkled and aged mask as of one far advanced in life. In addition to this singularity of aspect there was the extraordinary seclusion and sordid miserliness of his mode of existence, more in harmony with the passiveness of extreme old age, than with the energy of a man still in the prime of his days. The village mothers frightened their children with tales about Jean Merle's gigantic strength, which made him an object of terror to them. He sought acquaintanceship with none of his neighbors; and they avoided him as a heretic and a stranger.

The rugged, simple, narrow life of his Swiss forefathers gathered around him, and hedged him in. They had been peasant-farmers, with the exception of the mountain-pastor his grandfather, and he still well-remembered Felix Merle, after whom his boy had been called. All of them had been men toiling with their own hands, with a never-ceasing bodily activity, which had left them but little time or faculty for any mental pursuit. This half of his nature fitted him well for the life that now lay before him. As his Swiss ancestors had been for many generations toil-worn and weather-beaten men, whose faces were sunburnt and sun-blistered, whose backs were bent with labor, and whose weary feet dragged heavily along the rough paths, so he became. The social refinement of the prosperous Englishman, skin deep as it is, vanished in the coarse and narrow life to which he had partly doomed himself, had partly been doomed, by the dull, despondent apathy which had possessed his soul, when he first left the hospital in Lucerne.

His mode of living was as monotonous as it was solitary. His work only gave him some passing interest, for in the bitterness of his spirit he kept himself quite apart from all relation with his fellow-men. As far as in him lay he shut out the memory of the irrevocable past, and forbade his heart to wander back to the years that were gone. He strove to concentrate himself upon his daily toil, and the few daily wants of his body; and after a while a small degree of calm and composure had been won by him. Roland Sefton was dead; let him lie motionless, as a corpse should do, in the silence of his grave. But Jean Merle was living, and might continue to live another twenty years or more, thus solitarily and monotonously.

But there was one project which he formed early in his new state of existence, which linked him by a living link to the old. As soon as he found he could earn handsome wages for his skilled and delicate work, wages which he could in no way spend, and yet continue the penance which he pronounced upon himself, the thought came to him of restoring the money which had been intrusted to him by old Marlowe, and the other poor men who had placed their savings in his care. To repay the larger amount to which he was indebted to Mr. Clifford would be impossible; but to earn the other sums, though it might be the work of years, was still practicable, especially if from time to time he could make safe and prudent speculations, such as his knowledge of the money-market might enable him to do, so as to insure more rapid returns. At the village inn he could see the newspapers, with their lists of the various continental funds, and the share and stock markets; and without entering at all into the world he could direct the buying in and selling out of his stock through some bankers in Lucerne.

Even this restitution must be made in secret, and be so wrapped up in darkness and stealth that no one could suspect the hand from which it came. For he knew that the net he had woven about himself was too strong and intricate to be broken through without deadly injury to others, and above all to Felicita. The grave yonder, and the stone cross above it, barred the way to any return by the path he had come. But would it be utterly impossible for him to venture back, changed as he was by these many years, to England? It would be only Jean Merle who would travel thither, there could be no resurrection for Roland Sefton. But could not Jean Merle see from afar off the old home; or Phebe Marlowe's cottage on the hill-side; or possibly his mother, or his children; nay, Felicita herself? Only afar off; as some banished, repentant soul, drawing a little nearer to the walls of the eternal city, might be favored with a glimpse of the golden streets, and the white-robed citizens therein, the memory of which would dwell within him for evermore.

As he drew nearer the end he grew more eager to reach it. The dull apathy of the past thirteen years was transformed into a feverish anticipation of his secret journey to England with the accumulated proceeds of his work and his speculations; which in some way or other must find their way into the hands of the men who had trusted him in time past. But at this juncture the bankers at Lucerne failed him, as he had failed others. It was not simply that his speculations turned out badly; but the men to whom he had intrusted the conduct of them, from his solitary mountain-home, had defrauded him; and the bank broke. The measure he had meted out to others had been measured to him again. Whatsoever he had done unto men they had done unto him.

For three days Jean Merle wandered about the eternal frosts of the ice-bound peaks and snow-fields of the mountains around him, living he did not himself know how. It was not money he had lost. Like old Marlowe he realized how poor a symbol money was of the long years of ceaseless toil, the days of self-denial, the hours of anxious thoughts it represented. And besides this darker side, it stood also for the hopes he had cherished, vaguely, almost unconsciously, but still with strong earnestness. He had fled from the penalty the just laws of his country demanded from him, taking refuge in a second and more terrible fraud, and now God suffered him not to make this small reparation for his sin, or to taste the single drop of satisfaction that he hoped for in realizing the object he had set before him. There was no place of repentance for him; not a foot-hold in all the wide wilderness of his banishment on which he could stand, and repair one jot a little of the injury he had inflicted upon his fellow-men.

What passed through his soul those three days, amidst the ice-solitudes where no life was, and where the only sounds that spoke to him were the wild awful tones of nature in her dreariest haunts, he could never tell; he could hardly recall it to his own memory. He felt as utterly alone as if no other human being existed on the face of the earth; yet as if he alone had to bear the burden of all the falsehood, and dishonesty and dishonor of the countless generations of false and dishonorable men which this earth has seen.

All hope was dead now. There was nothing more to work for, or to look forward to. Nothing lay before him but his solitary blank life in the miserable hut below. There was no interest in the world for him but Roland Sefton's grave.

He descended the mountain-side at last. For the first time since he had left the valley he noticed that the sun was shining, and that the whole landscape below him was bathed in light. The village was all astir, and travellers were coming and going. It was not in the sight of all the world that he could drag his weary feet to the cemetery, where Roland Sefton's grave was; and he turned aside into his own hut to wait till the evening was come.

At last the sun went down upon his misery, and the cool shades of the long twilight crept on. He made a circuit round the village to reach the spot he longed to visit. His downcast eyes saw nothing but the rough ground he trod, and the narrow path his footsteps had made to the solitary grave, until he was close to it; and then, looking up to read the name upon the cross, he discerned the figure of a girl kneeling before it, and carefully planting a little slip of ivy into the soil beneath it.



CHAPTER X.

ALICE PASCAL.

Alice Pascal looked up into Jean Merle's face with the frank and easy self-possession of a well-bred English woman; coloring a little with girlish shyness, yet at the same time smiling with a pleasant light in her dark eyes. The oval of her face, and the color of her hair and eyes, resembled, though slightly, the more beautiful face of Felicita in her girlhood; it was simply the curious likeness which runs through some families to the remotest branches. But her smile, the shape of her eyes, the kneeling attitude, riveted him to the spot where he stood, and struck him dumb. A fancy flashed across his brain, which shone like a light from heaven. Could this girl be Hilda, his little daughter, whom he had seen last sleeping in her cot? Was she then come, after many years, to visit her father's grave?

There had always been a corroding grief to him in the thought that it was Felicita herself who had erected that cross over the tomb of the stranger, with whom his name was buried. He did not know that it was Mr. Clifford alone who had thus set a mark upon the place where he believed that the son of his old friend was lying. It had pained Jean Merle to think that Felicita had commemorated their mutual sin by the erection of an imperishable monument; and it had never surprised him that no one had visited the grave. His astonishment came now. Was it possible that Felicita had revisited Switzerland? Could she be near at hand, in the village down yonder? His mother, also, and his boy, Felix, could they be treading the same soil, and breathing the same air as himself? An agony of mingled terror and rapture shot through his inmost soul. His lips were dry, and his throat parched: he could not articulate a syllable.

He did not know what a gaunt and haggard madman he appeared. His grey hair was ragged and tangled, and his sunken eyes gleamed with a strange brightness. The villagers, who were wont at times to call him an imbecile, would have been sure they were right at this moment, as he stood motionless and dumb, staring at Alice; but to her he looked more like one whose reason was just trembling in the balance. She was alone, her father was no longer in sight; but she was not easily frightened. Rather a sense of sacred pity for the forlorn wretch before her filled her heart.

"See!" she said, in clear and penetrating accents, full, however, of gentle kindness, and she spoke unconsciously in English, "see! I have carried this little slip of ivy all the way from England to plant it here. This is the grave of a man I should have loved very dearly."

A rapid flush of color passed over her face as she spoke, leaving it paler than before, while a slight sadness clouded the smile in her eyes.

"Was he your father?" he articulated, with an immense effort.

"No," she answered; "not my father, but the father of my dearest friends. They cannot come here; but it was his son who gathered this slip of ivy from our porch at home, and asked me to plant it here for him. Will it grow, do you think?"

"It shall grow," he muttered.

It was not his daughter, then; none of his own blood was at hand. But this English girl fascinated him; he could not turn away his eyes, but watched every slight movement as she carefully gathered the soil about the root of the little plant, which he vowed within himself should grow. She was rather long about her task, for she wished this madman to go away, and leave her alone beside Roland Sefton's grave. What her father had told her about him was still strange to her, and she wanted to familiarize it to herself. But still the haggard-looking peasant lingered at her side, gazing at her with his glowering and sunken eyes; yet neither moving nor speaking.

"You know English?" she said, as all at once it occurred to her that she had spoken to him as she would have spoken to one of the villagers in their own country churchyard at home, and that he had answered her. He replied only by a gesture.

"Can you find me some one who will take charge of this little plant?" she asked.

Jean Merle raised his head and lifted up his dim eyes to the eastern mountain-peaks, which were still shining in the rays of the sinking sun, though the twilight was darkening everywhere in the valley. Only last night he had slept among some juniper-bushes just below the boundary of that everlasting snow, feeling himself cast out forever from any glimpse of his old Paradise. But now, if he could only find words and utterance, there was come to him, even to him, a messenger, an angel direct from the very heart of his home, who could tell him all that last night he believed that he should never know. The tears sprang to his eyes, blessed tears; and a rush of uncontrollable longing overwhelmed him. He must hear all he could of those whom he loved; and then, whether he lived long or died soon, he would thank God as long as his miserable life continued.

"It is I who take care of this grave," he said; "I was with him when he died. He spoke to me of Felix and Hilda and his mother; and I saw their portraits. You hear? I know them all."

"Was it you who watched beside him?" asked Alice eagerly. "Oh! sit down here and tell me all about it; all you can remember. I will tell it all again to Felix, and Hilda, and Phebe Marlowe; and oh! how glad, and how sorry they will be to listen!"

There was no mention of Felicita's name, and Jean Merle felt a terrible dread come over him at this omission. He sank down on the ground beside the grave, and looked up into Alice's bright young face, with eyes that to her were no longer lit up with the fire of insanity, however intense and eager they might seem. It was an undreamed-of chance which had brought to her side the man who had watched by the death-bed of Felix's father.

"Tell me all you remember," she urged.

"I remember nothing," he answered, pressing his dark hard hand against his forehead, "it is more than thirteen years ago. But he showed to me their portraits. Is his wife still living?"

"Oh, yes!" she answered, "but she will not let either of them come to Switzerland; neither Felix nor Hilda. Nobody speaks of this country in her hearing; and his name is never uttered. But his mother used to talk to us about him; and Phebe Marlowe does so still. She has painted a portrait of him for Felix."

"Is Roland Sefton's mother yet alive?" he asked, with a dull, aching foreboding of her reply.

"No," she said. "Oh! how we all loved dear old Madame Sefton! She was always more like Felix and Hilda's mother than Cousin Felicita was. We loved her more a hundred times than Cousin Felicita, for we are afraid of her. It was her husband's death that spoiled her whole life and set her quite apart from everybody else. But Madame—she was not made so utterly miserable by it; she knew she would meet her son again in heaven. When she was dying she said to Cousin Felicita, 'He did not return to me, but I go to him; I go gladly to see again my dear son.' The very last words they heard her say were, 'I come, Roland!'"

Alice's voice trembled, and she laid her hand caressingly on the name of Roland Sefton graved on the cross above her. Jean Merle listened, as if he heard the words whispered a long way off, or as by some one speaking in a dream. The meaning had not reached his brain, but was travelling slowly to it, and would surely pierce his heart with a new sorrow and a fresh pang of remorse. The loud chanting of the monks in the abbey close by broke in upon their solemn silence, and awoke Alice from the reverie into which she had fallen.

"Can you tell me nothing about him?" she asked. "Talk to me as if I was his child."

"I have nothing to tell you," answered Jean Merle. "I remember nothing he said."

She looked down on the poor ragged peasant at her feet, with his gaunt and scarred features, and his slowly articulated speech. There seemed nothing strange in such a man not being able to recall Roland Sefton's dying words. It was probable that he barely understood them; and most likely he could not gather up the meaning of what she herself was saying. The few words he uttered were English, but they were very few and forced.

"I am sorry," she said gently, "but I will tell them you promised to take care of the ivy I have planted here."

She wished the dull, gray-headed villager would go home, and leave her alone for awhile in this solemn and sacred place; but he crouched still on the ground, stirring neither hand nor foot. When at last she moved as if to go away, he stretched out a toil-worn hand, and laid it on her dress.

"Stay," he said, "tell me more about Roland Sefton's children; I will think of it when I am tending this grave."

"What am I to tell you?" she asked gently, "Hilda is three years younger than me, and people say we are like sisters. She and Felix were brought up with me and my brothers in my father's house; we were like brothers and sisters. And Felix is like another son to my father, who says he will be both good and great some day. Good he is now; as good as man can be."

"And you love him!" said Jean Merle, in a low and humble voice, with his head turned away from her, and resting on the lowest step of the cross.

Alice started and trembled as she looked down on the grave and the prostrate man. It seemed to her as if the words had almost come out of this sad, and solitary, and forsaken grave, where Roland Sefton had lain unvisited so many years. The last gleam of daylight had vanished from the snowy peaks, leaving them wan and pallid as the dead. A sudden chill came into the evening air which made her shiver; but she was not terrified, though she felt a certain bewilderment and agitation creeping through her. She could not resist the impulse to answer the strange question.

"Yes, I love Felix," she said simply. "We love each other dearly."

"God bless you!" cried Jean Merle, in a tremulous voice. "God in heaven bless you both, and preserve you to each other."

He had lifted himself up, and was kneeling before her, eagerly scanning her face, as if to impress it on his memory. He bent down his gray head and kissed her hand humbly and reverently, touching it only with his lips. Then starting to his feet he hastened away from the cemetery, and was soon lost to her sight in the gathering gloom of the dusk.

For a little while longer Alice lingered at the grave, thinking over what had passed. It was not much as she recalled it, but it left her agitated and disturbed. Yet after all she had only uttered aloud what her heart would have said at the grave of Felix's father. But this strange peasant, so miserable and poverty-stricken, so haggard and hopeless-looking, haunted her thoughts both waking and sleeping. Early the next morning she and Canon Pascal went to the hovel inhabited by Jean Merle, but found it deserted and locked up. Some laborers had seen him start off at daybreak up the Truebsee Alps, from which he might be either ascending the Titlis or taking the route to the Joch-Pass. There was no chance of his return that day, and Jean Merle's absence might last for several days, as he was eccentric, and bestowed his confidence on nobody. There was little more to be learned of him, except that he was a heretic, a stranger, and a miser. Canon Pascal and Alice visited once more Roland Sefton's grave, and then they went on their way over the Joch-Pass, with some faint hopes of meeting with Jean Merle on their route, hopes that were not fulfilled.



CHAPTER XI.

COMING TO HIMSELF.

When he left the cemetery Jean Merle went home to his wretched chalet, flung himself down on his rough bed, and slept for some hours the profound and dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. The last three nights he had passed under the stars, and stretched upon the low juniper-bushes. He awoke suddenly, from the bright, clear moonlight of a cloudless sky and dry atmosphere streaming in through his door, which he had left open. There was light enough for him to withdraw some money from a safe hiding-place he had constructed in his crazy old hut, and to make up a packet of most of the clothing he possessed. There were between twenty and thirty pounds in gold pieces of twenty francs each—the only money he was master of now his Lucerne bankers had failed him. A vague purpose, dimly shaping itself, was in his brain, but he was in no hurry to see it take definite form. With his small bundle of clothes and his leathern purse he started off in the earliest rays of the dawn to escape being visited by the young English girl, whom he had seen at the grave, and who would probably seek him out in the morning with her father. Who they were he could find out if he himself returned to Engelberg.

If he returned; for, as he ascended the steep path leading up to the Truebsee Alp, he turned back to look at the high mountain-valley where he had dwelt so long, as though he was looking upon it for the last time. It seemed to him as if he was awaking out of a long lethargy and paralysis. Three days ago the dull round of incessant toil and parsimonious hoarding had been abruptly broken up by the loss of all he had toiled for and hoarded up, and the shock had driven him out like a maniac, to wander about the desolate heights of Engelberg in a mood bordering on despair, which had made him utterly reckless of his life. Since then news had come to him from home—stray gleams from the Paradise he had forfeited. Strongest of them all was the thought that these fourteen years had transformed his little son Felix into a man, loving as he himself had loved, and already called to take his part in the battle of life. He had never realized this before, and it stirred his heart to the very depths. His children had been but soft, vague memories to him; it was Felicita who had engrossed all his thought. All at once he comprehended that he was a father, the father of a son and daughter, who had their own separate life and career. A deep and poignant interest in these beings took possession of him. He had called them into existence; they belonged to him by a tie which nothing on earth, in heaven, or in hell itself could destroy. As long as they lived there must be an indestructible interest for him in this world. Felicita was no longer the first in his thoughts.

The dim veil which time had drawn around them was rent asunder, and they stood before him bathed in light, but placed on the other side of a gulf as fathomless, as impassable, and as death-like as the ice-crevasses yawning at his feet. He gazed down into the cold, gleaming abyss, and across it to the sharp and slippery margin where there could be no foot-hold, and he pictured to himself the springing across that horrible gulf to reach them on the other side, and the falling, with outstretched hands and clutching fingers, into the unseen icy depths below him. For the first time in his life he shrank back shivering and terror-stricken from the edge of the crevasse, with palsied limbs and treacherous nerves. He felt that he must get back into safer standing-ground than this solitary and perilous glacier.

He reached at last a point of safety, where he could lie down and let his trembling limbs rest awhile. The whole slope of the valley lay below him, with its rich meadows of emerald green, and its silvery streams wandering through them. Little farms and chalets were dotted about, some of them clinging to the sides of the rocks opposite to him, or resting on the very edge of precipices thousands of feet deep, and looking as if they were about to slip over them. He felt his head grow giddy as he looked at them, and thought of the children at play in such dangerous playgrounds. There were a few gray clouds hanging about the Titlis, and caught upon the sharp horns of the rugged peaks around the valley. Every peak and precipice he knew; they had been his refuge in the hours of his greatest anguish. But these palsied limbs and this giddy head could not be trusted to carry him there again. He had lost his last hope of making any atonement. Hope was gone; was he to lose his indomitable courage also? It was the last faculty which made his present life endurable.

He lay motionless for hours, neither listening nor looking. Yet he heard, for the memory of it often came back to him in after years, the tinkling of innumerable bells from the pastures below him, and around him; and the voices of many waterfalls rushing down through the pine-forests into the valley; and the tossing to and fro of the interwoven branches of the trees. And he saw the sunlight stealing from one point to another, chased by the shadows of the clouds, that gathered and dispersed, dimming the blue sky for a little time, and then leaving it brighter and deeper than before. He was unconscious of it all; he was even unaware that his brain was at work at all, until suddenly, like a flash, there rose upon him the clear, resolute, unchangeable determination, "I will go to England."

He started up at once, and seized his bundle and his alpenstock. The afternoon was far advanced, but there was time enough to reach the Engstlenalp, where he could stay the night, and go on in the morning to Meiringen. He could be in England in three days.

Three days: so short a time separated him from the country and the home from which he had been exiled so many years. Any day during those fourteen years he might have started homeward as he was doing now; but there had not been the irresistible hunger in his heart that at this moment drove him thither. He had been vainly seeking to satisfy himself with husks; but even these, dry and empty, and bitter as they were, had failed him. He had lost all; and having lost all, he was coming to himself.

There was not the slightest fear of detection in his mind. A gray-haired man with bowed shoulders, and seamed and marred face, who had lost every trace of the fastidiousness, which had verged upon foppery in the handsome and prosperous Roland Sefton, ran no risk of recognition, more especially as Roland Sefton had been reckoned among the dead and buried for many a long year. The lineaments of the dead die with them, however cunningly the artist may have used his skill to preserve them. The face is gone, and the memory of it. Some hearts may long to keep it engraven sharp and clear in their remembrance; but oh, when the "inward eye" comes to look for it how dull and blurred it lies there, like a forgotten photograph which has grown faded and stained in some seldom-visited cabinet!

Jean Merle travelled, as a man of his class would travel, in a third-class wagon and a slow train; but he kept on, stopping nowhere for rest, and advancing as rapidly as he could, until on the third day, in the gray of the evening, he saw the chalk-line of the English coast rising against the faint yellow light of the sunset; and as night fell his feet once more trod upon his native soil.

So far he had been simply yielding to his blind and irresistible longing to get back to England, and nearer to his unknown children. He had heard so little of them from Alice Pascal, that he could no longer rest without knowing more. How to carry out his intention he did not know, and he had hardly given it a thought. But now, as he strolled slowly along the flat and sandy shore for an hour or two, with the darkness hiding both sea and land from him, except the spot on which he stood, he began to consider what steps he must take to learn what he wanted to know, and to see their happiness afar off without in any way endangering it. He had purchased it at too heavy a price to be willing to place it in any peril now.

That Felicita had left Riversborough he had heard from her own lips, but there was no other place where he was sure of discovering her present abode, for London was too wide a city, even if she had carried out her intention of living there, for him to ascertain where she dwelt. Phebe Marlowe would certainly know where he could find them, for the English girl at Roland Sefton's grave had spoken of Phebe as familiarly as of Felix and Hilda—spoken of her, in fact, as if she was quite one of the family. There would be no danger in seeking out Phebe Marlowe. If his own mother could not have recognized her son in the rugged peasant he had become, there was no chance of a young girl such as Phebe had been ever thinking of Roland Sefton in connection with him; and he could learn all he wished to know from her.

He was careful to take the precaution of exchanging his foreign garb of a Swiss peasant for the dress of an English mechanic. The change did not make him look any more like his old self, for there was no longer any incongruity in his appearance. No soul on earth knew that he had not died many years ago, except Felicita. He might saunter down the streets of his native town in broad daylight on a market-day, and not a suspicion would cross any brain that here was their old townsman, Roland Sefton, the fraudulent banker.

Yet he timed his journey so as not to reach Riversborough before the evening of the next day; and it was growing dusk when he paced once more the familiar streets, slowly, and at every step gathering up some sharp reminiscence of the past. How little were they changed! The old grammar-school, with its gray walls and mullioned windows, looked exactly as it had done when he was yet a boy wearing his college-cap and carrying his satchel of school-books. His name, he knew, was painted in gold on a black tablet on the walls inside as a scholar who had gained a scholarship. Most of the shops on each side of the streets bore the same names and looked but little altered. In the churchyard the same grave-stones were standing as they stood when he, as a child, spelt out their inscriptions through the open railings which separated them from the causeway. There was a zigzag crack in one of the flag-stones, which was one of his earliest recollections; he stood and put his clumsy boot upon it as he had often placed his little foot in those childish years, and leaning his head against the railings of the churchyard, where all his English forefathers for many a generation were buried, he waited as if for some voice to speak to him.

Suddenly the bells in the dark tower above him rang out a peal, clanging and clashing noisily together as if to give him a welcome. They had rung so the day he brought Felicita home after their long wedding journey. It was Friday night, the night when the ringers had always been used to practise, in the days when he was churchwarden. The pain of hearing them was intolerable; he could bear no more that night. Not daring to go on and look at the house where he was born, and where his children had been born, but which he could never more enter, he sought out a quiet inn, and shut himself up in a garret there to think, and at last to sleep.



CHAPTER XII.

A GLIMPSE INTO PARADISE.

I cannot tell whether it was fancy merely, but the morning light which streamed into his room seemed more familiar and home-like to him than it had ever done in Switzerland. He was awakened by one of those sounds which dwell longest in the memory—the chiming of the church bells nearest home, which in childhood had so often called to him to shake off his slumbers, and which spoke to him now in sweet and friendly tones, as if he was still an innocent child. The tempest-tossed, sinful man lay listening to them for a minute or two, half asleep yet. He had been dreaming that he was in truth dead, but that the task assigned to him was that of an invisible guardian and defender to those who had lost him. He had been present all these years with his wife, and mother, and children, going out and coming in with them, hearing all their conversation, and sharing their family life, but himself unseen and unheard, felt only by the spiritual influence he could exercise over them. It had been a blissful dream, such as had never visited him in his exile; and as the familiar chiming of the bells, high up in the belfry not far from his attic, fell upon his ear, the dream for a brief moment gathered a stronger sense of reality.

It was with a strange feeling, as if he was himself a phantom mingling with creatures of flesh and blood, that he went out into the streets. His whole former life lay unrolled before him, but there was no point at which he could touch it. Every object and every spot was commonplace, yet invested with a singular and intense significance. Many a man among the townsfolk he knew by name and history, whose eyes glanced at him as a stranger, with no surprise at his appearance, and no show of suspicion or of welcome. Certainly he was nothing but a ghost revisiting the scenes of a life to which there was no possible return. Yet how he longed to stretch out his hand and grasp those of these old towns-people of his! Even the least interesting of the shopkeepers in the streets, bestirring themselves to meet the business of a new day, seemed to him one of the most desirable of companions.

His heart was drawing him to Whitefriars Road, to that spot on earth of all others most his own, but his resolution failed him whenever he turned his face that way. He rambled into the ancient market square, where stood a statue of his Felicita's great uncle, the first Baron Riversdale. The long shadow of it fell across him as he lingered to look in at a bookseller's window. He and the bookseller had been school-fellows together at the grammar-school, and their friendship had lasted after each was started in his own career. Hundreds of times he had crossed this door-sill to have a chat with the studious and quiet bookworm within whose modest life was so great a contrast with his own. Jean Merle stopped at the well-remembered shop-window.

His eyes glanced aimlessly along the crowded shelves, but suddenly his attention was arrested, and his pulses, which had been beating somewhat fast, throbbed with eager rapidity. A dozen volumes or more, ranged together, were labelled, "Works by Mrs. Roland Sefton." Surprise, and pride, and pleasure were in the rapid beatings of his heart. By Felicita! He read over the titles with a new sense of delight and admiration; and in the first glow of his astonishment he stepped quickly into the shop, with erect head and firm tread, and found himself face to face with his old school-fellow. The sight of his blank, unrecognizing gaze brought him back to the consciousness of the utter change in himself. He looked down at his coarse hands and mechanic's dress, and remembered that he was no longer Roland Sefton. His tongue was parched; it was difficult to stammer out a word.

"Do you want anything, my good man?" asked the bookseller quietly.

There was something in the words "my good man" that brought home to him at once the complete separation between his former life and the present, and the perfect security that existed for him in the conviction that Roland Sefton was dead. With a great effort he commanded himself, and answered the bookseller's question collectedly.

"There are some books in the window by Mrs. Roland Sefton," he said, "how much are they?"

"That is the six shilling edition," replied the bookseller.

Jean Merle was on the point of saying he would take them all, but he checked himself. He must possess them all, and read every line that Felicita had ever written, but not now, and not here.

"Which do you think is the best?" he asked.

"They are all good," was the answer; "we are very proud of Mrs. Roland Sefton, who belongs to Riversborough. That is her great uncle yonder, the first Lord Riversdale; and she married a prominent townsman, Roland Sefton, of the Old Bank. I have a soiled copy or two, which I could sell to you for half the price of the new ones."

"She is famous then?" said Jean Merle.

"She has won her rank as an author," replied the bookseller. "I knew her husband well, and he always foretold that she would make her mark; and she has. He died fourteen years ago; and, strange to say, there was something about your step as you came in which reminded me of him. Do you belong to Riversborough?"

"No," he answered; "but my name is Jean Merle, and I am related to Madame Sefton, his mother. I suppose there is some of the same blood in Roland Sefton and me."

"That is it," said the bookseller cordially. "I thought you were a foreigner, though you speak English so well."

"There was some mystery about Roland Sefton's death?" remarked Jean Merle.

"No, no; at least not much," was the answer. "He went away on a long holiday, unluckily without announcing it, on account of bank business; but Mr. Clifford, the senior partner, was on his way to take charge of affairs. There was but one day between Roland Sefton's departure and Mr. Clifford's arrival, but during that very day, for some reason or other unknown, the head clerk committed suicide, and there was a panic and a run upon the bank. Unfortunately there was no means of communicating with Sefton, who had started at once for the continent. Mr. Clifford did not see any necessity for his return, as the mischief was done; but just as his six months' absence was over—not all holiday, as folks said, for there was foreign business to see after—he died by accident in Switzerland. I knew the truth better than most people; for Mr. Clifford came here often, and dropped many a hint. Some persons still say the police were seeking for Roland; but that is not true. It was an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances."

"You knew him well?" said Jean Merle.

"Yes; we were school-fellows and friends," answered the bookseller, "and a finer fellow never breathed. He was always eager to get on, and to help other people on. We have not had such a public-spirited man amongst us since he died. It cuts me to the heart when anybody pretends that he absconded. Absconded! Why! there were dozens of us who would have made him welcome to every penny we could command. But I own appearances were against him, and he never came back to clear them up, and prove his innocence."

"And this is his wife's best book," said Jean Merle, holding it with shaking, nerveless hands. Felicita's book! The tears burned under his eyelids as he looked down on it.

"I won't say it is the best; it is my favorite," replied the bookseller. "Her son, Felix Sefton, a clergyman now, was in here yesterday, asking the same question. If you are related to Madame Sefton, you'll be very welcome at the Old Bank; and you'll find both of Madame's grand-children visiting old Mr. Clifford. I'll send one of my boys to show you the house."

"Not now," said Jean Merle. If Mr. Clifford was living yet he must be careful what risks he ran. Hatred has eyes as keen as love; and if any one could break through his secret it would be the implacable old man, who had still the power of sending him to a convict prison.

A shudder ran through him at the dread idea of detection. What would it be to Felicita now, when her name was famous, to have it dragged down to ignominy and utter disgrace? The dishonor would be a hundred-fold the greater for the fair reputation she had won, and the popularity she had secured. And her children too! Worse for them past all words would it be than if they were still little creatures, ignorant of the value of the world's opinion. He bade the bookseller good-morning, and threaded his way through many alleys and by-lanes of the old town until he reached a ferry and a boat-house, where many a boat lay ready for him, as they had always done when he was a boy. He seated himself in one of them, and taking the oars fell down with the current to the willows under the garden-wall of his old home.

He steered his boat aside into a small creek, where the willow-wands grew tall and thick, from which he could see the whole river frontage of the old house. Was there any change in it? His keen, despairing gaze could not detect one. The high tilted gables in the roof stood out clear against the sky, with their spiral wooden rods projecting above them. The oriel window cast its slowly moving shadow on the half-timber walls; and the many lattice casements, with their small diamond-shaped panes, glistened in the sun as in the days gone by. The garden-plots were unchanged, and the smooth turf on the terraces was as green and soft as when he ran along them at his mother's side. The old house brought to his mind his mother rather than his wife. It was full of associations and memories of her, with her sweet, humble, self-sacrificing nature. There was repose and healing in the very thought of her, which seemed to touch his anguish with a strong and soothing hand. Was there an echo of her voice still lingering for him about the old spot where he had listened to it so often? Could he hear her calling to him by his name, the name he had buried irrecoverably in a foreign grave? For the first time for many years he bent down his face upon his hands, and wept many tears; not bitter ones, full of grief as they were. His mother was dead; he had not wept for her till now.

Presently there came upon the summer silence the sound of a young, clear, laughing voice, calling "Phebe;" and he lifted up his head to look once more at the house. An old man, with silvery white hair was pacing slowly to and fro on the upper terrace, and a slight girlish figure was beside him. That was old Clifford, his enemy; but could that girl be Hilda? A face looked out of one of the windows, smiling down upon this young girl, which he knew again as Phebe Marlowe's. By and by she came down to the terrace, with a tall, fine-looking young man walking beside her; and all three, bidding farewell to the old man, descended from terrace to terrace, becoming every minute more distinct to his eyes. Yes, there was Phebe; and these others must be his girl Hilda and his son Felix. They were near to him, every word they spoke reached his ears, and penetrated to his heart. They seemed more beautiful, more perfect than any young creatures he had ever beheld. He listened to them unfastening the chain which secured the boat, and to the creaking of the row-locks as they fitted the oars into them. It was as if one of his own long-lost days was come back again to earth, when he had sat where Felix was now sitting, with Felicita instead of Hilda dipping her little white hand into the water. He had scarcely eyes for Phebe; but he was conscious that she was there, for Hilda was speaking to her in a low voice which just reached him. "See," she said, "that man has one of my mother's books! And he is quite a common man!"

"As much a common man, perhaps, as I am a common woman," answered Phebe, in a gentle though half-reproving tone.

As long as his eyes could see them they were fastened upon the receding boat; and long after, he gazed in the direction in which they had gone. He had had the passing glimpse he longed for into the Paradise he had forfeited. This had been his place, appointed to him by God, where he could have served God best, and served Him in as perfect gladness and freedom as the earth gives to any of her children. What lot could have been more blessed? The lines had fallen unto him in pleasant places; he had had a goodly heritage, and he had lost it through grasping dishonestly at a larger share of what this world called success. The madness and the folly of his sin smote him with unutterable bitterness.

He could bear to look at it no longer. The yearning he had felt to see his old home was satisfied; but the satisfaction seemed an increase of sorrow. He would not wait to witness the return of his children. The old man was gone into the house, and the garden was quiet and deserted. With weary strokes he rowed back again up the river; and with a heavier weight of sorrow and a keener consciousness of sin he made his way through the streets so familiar to his tread. It was as if no eye saw him, and no heart warmed to him in his native town. He was a stranger in a strange place; there was none to say to him, here or elsewhere on earth, "You are one of us."



CHAPTER XIII.

A LONDON GARRET.

There was one other place he must see before he went out again from this region of many memories, to which all that he could call life was linked—the little farmstead on the hills, which, of all places, had been his favorite haunt when a boy, and which had been the last spot he had visited before fleeing from England. Phebe Marlowe he had seen; if he went away at once he could see her home before her return to it. Next to his mother and his wife, he knew that Phebe was most likely to recognize him, if recognition by any one was possible. Most likely old Marlowe was dead; but if not, his senses would surely be too dull to detect him.

The long, hot, white highway, dusty with a week's drought, carried back his thoughts so fully to old times that he walked on unconscious of the noontide heat and the sultriness of the road. Yet when he came to the lanes, green overhead and underfoot, and as silent as the mountain-heights round Engelberg, he felt the solace of the change. All the recollections treasured up in the secret cells of memory were springing into light at every step; and these were remembrances less bitter than those the sight of his lost home had called to mind. He felt himself less of a phantom here, where no one met him or crossed his path, than in the streets where many faces looking blankly at him wore the well-known features of old comrades. By the time he gained the moorlands, and looked across its purple heather and yellow gorse, his mind was in a healthier mood than it had been for years. The low thatched roof of the small homestead, and the stunted and twisted trees surrounding it, seemed like a possible refuge to him, where for a little while he might find shelter from the storm of life. He pressed on with eagerness, and found himself quickly at the door, which he had never met with fastened.

But it was locked now. After knocking twice he tried the latch, but it did not open. He went to the little window, uncurtained as usual and peered in, but all was still and dark; there was not a glimmer of light on the hearth, where he had always seen some glimmering embers. There was no sign of life about the place; no dog barking, no sheep bleating, or fowls fluttering about the little farm-yard. All the innocent, joyous gayety of the place had vanished; yet he could see that it was not falling into decay; the thatch was in repair, the dark interior, dimly visible through the window, was as it used to be. It was not a ruin, but it was not a home. A home might have received him with its hospitable walls, or a ruin might have given him an hour's shelter. But Phebe's door was shut against him, though it would have done him good to stand within it once more, a penitent man.

He was turning away sadly, when a loud rustic voice called to him; and Simon Nixey, almost hidden under a huge load of dried ferns, came into sight. Jean Merle stepped down the stone causeway of the farm-yard to open the gate for him.

"What are you doing here?" he inquired suspiciously.

"A wood-carver, called old Marlowe, used to live here," he answered, "what has become of him?"

"Dead!" said Simon; "dead this many a year. Why, if you know anything you ought to know that."

"What did he die of?" asked Jean Merle.

"A broken heart, if ever man did," answered Simon; "he'd saved a mint o' money by scraping and moiling; and he lost it all when there was a run on the Old Bank over thirteen years ago. He couldn't talk about it like other folks, poor old Dummy! and it struck inwards, as you may say. It killed him as certain as if they'd shot a bullet into him."

Jean Merle staggered as if Simon had struck him a heavy blow. He had not thought of anything like this, old Marlowe dying broken-hearted, and Phebe left alone in the world. Simon Nixey seemed pleased at the impression his words had produced.

"Ay!" he said, "it was hard on old Marlowe; and drove my cousin, John Nixey, into desperate ways o' drinking. Not but all the money was paid up; only it was too late for them two. Every penny was paid, so as folks had nothing to say against the Old Bank. Only money won't bring a dead man back to life again. I offered Phebe to make her my wife before I knew it'ud be paid back; but she always said no, till I grew tired of it, and married somebody else."

"And where is she now?" inquired Jean Merle.

"Oh! she's quite the fine lady," answered Simon. "Mrs. Roland Sefton, Lord Riversdale's daughter that was, took quite a fancy to her, and had her to live with her in London; not as a servant, you know, but as a friend; and she paints pictures wonderful. My mother, who lives housekeeper with Mr. Clifford, hears say she can get sixty pounds or more for one likeness. Think of that now! If she'd been my wife what a fortune she'd have been to me!"

"Has she sold this place?" asked Jean Merle.

"There it is," he replied; "she gave her father a faithful promise never to part with it, or I'd have bought it myself. She comes here once a year with Miss Hilda and Mr. Felix, and they stay a week or two; and it's shut up all the rest of the time. I've got the key here if you'd like to look inside at old Dummy's carving."

How familiar, yet how different, the interior of the cottage seemed! He knew all these carvings, curious and beautiful, which lined the walls and decorated every article of the old oak furniture. But the hearth was cold, and there was no pleasant disorder about the small house telling its story of daily work. In the deep recess of the window-frame, where the western sun was already shining, stood old Marlowe's copy of a carved crucifix, which he had himself once brought from the Tyrol, and lent to him before finding a place for it in his own home. The sacred head was bowed down so low as to be almost hidden under the shadow of the crown of thorns. At the foot of the cross, in delicately small old English letters, the old man had carved the words, "Come unto me all ye that be weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He remembered pointing out the mistake that he had made to old Marlowe.

"I like it best," said the dumb man; "I have often been weary, but not with labor; weary of myself, weary of the world, weary of life, weary of everything but my Phebe. That is what Christ says to me."

Jean Merle could see the old man's speaking face again, and the fingers moving less swiftly when spelling out the words to him, than when he was talking to Phebe. Weary! weary! was it not so with him? Could any man on earth be more weary than he was?

He loitered back to Riversborough through the cool of the evening, with the pale stars shining dimly in the twilight of the summer sky; pondering, brooding over what he had seen and heard that day. He had already done much of what he had come to England to do; but what next? What was the path he ought to take now? He was in a labyrinth, where there were many false openings leading no-whither; and he had no clue to guide him. All these years he had lain as one dead in the coil he had wound about himself, but now he was living again. There was agony in the life that he had entered into, but it was better than the apathy of his death in life.

He returned to London, and hired a garret for a small weekly rent, where he would lodge until he could resolve what to do. But week after week passed without bringing to his mind the solution of the problem. Remorse had given place to repentance; but despair had not been succeeded by hope. There was nothing to hope for. The irrevocable past stood between him and any reparation for his sin which his soul earnestly desired to make. An easy thing, and light, it would have been to put himself into the power of his enemy, Mr. Clifford, and bear the penalty of the law. He had suffered a hundred fold more than justice would have exacted. The broken law demanded satisfaction, and it would have been a blessed relief to him to give it. But that could never be. He could never bear the penalty of his crime without dragging Felicita into depths of shame and suffering deeper than they would have been if he had borne it at first. The fame she had won for herself would lift up his infamy and hers to the intolerable gaze of a keen and bitter publicity. He must blacken her fair reputation if he sought to appease his own conscience.

He made no effort to find out where she and his children were living. But one after another, in the solitude of his garret, he read every book Felicita had written. They gave him no pleasure, and awoke in him no admiration, for he read them through different eyes from her other readers. There was great bitterness of soul for him in many of the sentences she had penned; now and then he came upon some to which he alone held the true key. He felt that he, her husband, was dwelling in her mind as a type of subtle selfishness and weak ambition. When she depicted a good or noble character it was almost invariably a woman, not a man; it was never a man past his early manhood. However varied their circumstances and temperaments, they were in the main worldly and mean; sometimes they were successful hypocrites, deceiving those nearest and dearest to them.

It was a wholesome penance to him, perhaps, but it shook and troubled his soul to its very depths. His sin had ruined the poor weakminded drunkard, John Nixey, and hastened the end of dumb old Marlowe; these consequences of it must, at any time, have clouded his own after-life. But it had also wrought a baneful change in the spirit of the woman whom he loved. It was he who had slain within her the hope, and the love, and the faith in her fellow-men which had been needed for the full perfecting of her genius.



CHAPTER XIV.

HIS FATHER'S SIN.

When Felix returned from his brief and clouded holiday to his work in that corner of the great vineyard, so overcrowded with busy husbandmen that they were always plucking up each others' plants, and pruning and repruning each others' vines, till they made a wilderness where there should have been a harvest, he found that his special plot there had suffered much damage. John Nixey, following up the impression he had so successfully made, had spread his story abroad, and found ears willing to listen to it, and hearts willing to believe it. The small Provident Club, instituted by Felix to check the waste and thriftlessness of the people, had already, in his short absence, elected another treasurer of its scanty funds; and the members who formed it, working men and women who had been gathered together by his personal influence, treated him with but scant civility. His evening lectures in the church mission-house were sometimes scarcely attended, whilst on other days there was an influx of hearers, among whom John Nixey was prominent, with half-a-dozen rough and turbulent fellows like himself, hangers-on at the nearest spirit-vaults, who were ready for any turn that might lead to a row. The women and children who had been accustomed to come stayed away, or went to some other of the numerous preaching-places, as though afraid of this boisterous element in his little congregation.

Now and then, too, he heard his name called out aloud in the streets by some of Nixey's friends, as he passed the prospering gin-palaces with their groups of loungers about the doors; but though he could catch the sound of the laugh and the sneer that followed him, he could take no notice. He could not turn round in righteous indignation and tell the fellows, and the listening bystanders, that what they said of his father was a lie. The poor young curate, with his high hopes and his enthusiastic love of the work he had chosen for the sake of his fellow-men, was compelled to pass on with bowed head, and silent lips, and a heart burdened with the conviction that his influence was altogether blighted and uprooted.

"It isn't true, sir, is it, what folks are tellin' about your father?" was a question put to him more than once, when he entered some squalid home, in the hope of giving counsel, or help, or comfort. There was something highly welcome and agreeable to these people, themselves thieves or bordering on thievedom, in the idea that this fine, handsome, gentlemanly young clergyman, who had set to work among them with so much energy and zeal, was the son of a dishonest rogue, who ought to have been sent to jail as many of them had been. Felix had not failed to make enemies in the Brickfields by his youthful intolerance of idleness, beggary, and drunkenness. The owners of the gin-palaces hated him, and not a few of the rival religious sects were, to say the least, uncharitably disposed towards one who had drawn so many of their followers to himself. There was very little common social interest in the population of the district, for the tramping classes of the lowest London poor, such as were drawn to the Brickfields by its overflowing charities, have as little cohesion as a rope of sand; but Felix was so conspicuous a figure in its narrow and dirty streets, that even strangers would nudge one another's elbows, and almost before he was gone by narrate Nixey's story, with curious additions and alterations.

It was gall and wormwood to Felix that he was unable to contradict the story in full. He could say that his father had never been a convict; but no inducement on earth could have wrung from him the declaration that his father had never been guilty of fraud. Sometimes he wondered whether it would not be well to own the simple truth, and endure the shame: if he had been the sole survivor of his father's sin this he would have done, and gone on toilsomely regaining the influence he had lost. But the secret touched his mother even more closely than himself, and Hilda was equally concerned in it. It had been sacredly kept by those older than he was, and it was not for him to betray it. "My poor mother!" he called her. Never, before he learned the secret burden she had borne, had he called her by that tender and pitiful epithet; but as often as he thought of her now his heart said, "My poor mother!"

As soon as Canon Pascal returned to England Felix took a day's holiday, and ran down by train to the quiet rectory in Essex, where he had spent the greater portion of his boyhood. Only a few years separated him from that careless and happiest period of his life; yet the last three months had driven it into the far background. He almost smiled at the recollection of how young he was half-a-year ago, when he had declared his love for Alice. How far dearer to him she was now than then! The one letter he had received from her, written in Switzerland, and telling him in loving detail of her visit to his father's grave, would be forever one of his most precious treasures. But he was not going to share his blemished name with her. He had had nothing worthy of her, or of his father, to lay at her feet, whilst he was yet in utter ignorance of the shame he had inherited; and now? He must never more think of her as his wife.

She was at home, he knew; but he sternly forbade himself to seek for her. It was Canon Pascal he had come down to see, and he went straight on to his well-known study. He was busy in the preparation of next Sunday's sermons, but at the sight of Felix's dejected, unsmiling face, he swept away his books and papers with one hand, whilst he stretched out his hand to give him such a warm, strong, hearty grip as he might have given to a drowning man.

"What is it, my son?" he asked.

There was such a full sympathetic tone in the friendly voice speaking to him, that Felix felt his burden already shared, and pressing less heavily on his bruised spirit. He stood a little behind Canon Pascal, with his hand upon his shoulder, as he had often placed himself before when he was pleading for some boyish indulgence, or begging pardon for some boyish fault.

"You have been like a true father to me, and I come to tell you a great trouble," he began in a tremulous voice.

"I know it, my boy," replied Canon Pascal; "you have found out how true it is, 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.' Ah! Felix, life teaches us so, as well as this wise old Book."

"You know it?" stammered Felix.

"Phebe told me," he interrupted, "six months since. And now you and I can understand Felicita. There was no prejudice against our Alice in her mind; no unkindness to either of you. But she could not bring herself to say the truth against the husband whom she has wept and mourned over so long. And your mother is the soul of truth and honor; she could not let you marry whilst we were ignorant of this matter. It has been a terrible cross to bear, and she has borne it in silence. I love and revere your mother more than ever."

"Yes!" said Felix with a sob. He had not yet seen her since coming to this fateful knowledge; for Phebe and Hilda had joined her at the sea-side where they were still staying. But if his father had gone down into depths of darkness, his mother had risen so much the higher in his reverence and love. She had become a saint and a martyr in his eyes; and to save her from a moment's grief seemed to be a cause worth dying for.

"I came to tell you all," he went on, "and to say I cannot any more hope that you will give Alice to me. God alone knows what it costs me to give her up: and she will suffer too for a while, a long while, I fear; for we have grown together so. But it must be. Alice cannot marry a man who has not even an unblemished name to offer to her."

"You should ask Alice herself about that," said Canon Pascal quietly.

A thrill of rapture ran through Felix, and he grasped the shoulder, on which his hand still rested, more firmly. What! was it possible that this second father of his knew all his disgrace and dishonor, how his teeth were set on edge by the sour grapes which he had not eaten, and yet was willing that Alice should share his name and his lot? There was no fear as to what Alice would say. He recollected how Phebe spoke, as if her thoughts dwelt more on his father's sorrow and sad death, than on his sin; and Alice would be the same. She would cover it with a woman's sweet charity. He could not command his voice to speak; and after a minute's pause Canon Pascal continued—

"Yes! Alice, too, knows all about it. I told her beside your father's grave. And do you suppose she said, 'Here is cause enough for me to break with Felix'? Nay, I believe if the sin had been your own, Alice would have said it was her duty to share it, and your repentance. Shall our Lord come to save sinners, and we turn away from their blameless children? Yet I thought it must be so at first, I own it, Felix; at first, while my eyes were blinded and my heart hardened; and I looked at it in the light of the world. But then I be-thought me of your mother. Shall not she make good to you the evil your father has wrought? If he dishonored your name in the eyes of a few, she has brought honor to it, and made it known far beyond the limits it could have been known through him. The world will regard you as her son, not as his."

"But I came also to tell you that I wish to leave the country," said Felix. "There is a difficulty in getting young men for our colonial work; and I am young and strong, stronger than most young men in the Church. I could endure hardships, and go in for work that feebler men must leave untried; you have taken care of that for me. Such a life would be more like old Felix Merle's than a London curacy. You let your own sons emigrate, believing that the old country is getting over-populated; and I thought I would go too."

"Why?" asked Canon Pascal, turning round in his chair, and looking up searchingly into his face.

In a few words, and in short broken sentences, Felix told him of Nixey's charge, and the change it had wrought in the London curacy, upon which he had entered with so much enthusiasm and delight.

"It will be the same wherever I go in England," he said in conclusion; "and I cannot face them boldly and say it is all a falsehood."

"You must live it down," answered Canon Pascal; "go on, and take no notice of it."

"But it hinders my work sadly," said Felix, "and I cannot go on in the Brickfields. There might be a row any evening, and then the story would come out in the police-courts; and what could I say? At least, I must give up that."

For a few minutes Canon Pascal was lost in thought. If Felix was right in his apprehension, and the whole story came out in the police-court, there were journals pandering to public curiosity that would gladly lay hold of any gossip or scandal connected with Mrs. Roland Sefton. Her name would ensure its publicity. And how could Felicita endure that, especially now that her health was affected? If the dread of disclosing her secret to him had wrought so powerfully upon her physical and mental constitution, what would she suffer if it became a nine days' talk for the world?

"I will get your rector to exchange curates with me till we can see our way clear," he said. "He is Alice's godfather, you know, and will do it willingly. I am going up to Westminster in November, and you will be here in my place, where everybody knows your face and you know theirs. There will be no question here about your father, for you are looked upon as my son. Now go away, and find Alice."

When Felix turned out of Liverpool Street station that evening, a tall, gaunt-looking workman man offered to carry his bag for him. It was filled with choice fruit from the rectory garden, grown on trees grafted and pruned by Canon Pascal's own hands; and Felix had helped Alice to gather it for some of his sick parishioners in the unwholesome dwelling-places he visited.

"I am going no farther than the Mansion House," he answered, "and I can carry it myself."

"You'd do me a kindness if you'd let me carry it," said the man.

It was not the tone of a common loafer, hanging about the station for any chance job, and Felix turned to look at him in the light of the street-lamp. It was the old story, he thought to himself, a decent mechanic from the country, out of work, and lost in this great labyrinth of a city. He handed his bag to him and walked on along the crowded thoroughfare, soon forgetting that he was treading the flagged streets of a city; he was back again, strolling through dewy fields in the cool twilight, with Alice beside him, accompanying him to the quiet little station. He thought no more of the stranger behind him, or of the bag he carried, until he hailed an omnibus travelling westward.

"Here is your bag, sir," said the man.

"Ah! I'd forgotten it," exclaimed Felix. "Good night, and thank you."

He had just time to drop a shilling into his hand before the omnibus was off. But the man stood there in front of the Mansion House, motionless, with all the busy sea of life roaring around him, hearing nothing and seeing nothing. This coin that lay in his hand had been given to him by his son; his son's voice was still sounding in his ears. He had walked behind him taking note of his firm strong step, his upright carriage and manly bearing. It had been too swift a march for him, full of exquisite pain and pleasure, which chance might never offer to him again.

"Move on, will you?" said a policeman authoritatively; and Jean Merle, rousing himself from his reverie, went back to his lonely garret.



CHAPTER XV.

HAUNTING MEMORIES.

Felicita was slowly recovering her strength at the sea-side. She had never before felt so seriously shaken in health, as since she had known of the attachment of Felix to Alice Pascal; an attachment which would have been quite to her mind, if there was no loss of honor in allowing it whilst she held a secret which, in all probability, would seem an insuperable barrier in the eyes of Canon Pascal.

This secret she had kept resolutely in the background of her own memory, conscious of its existence, but never turning her eyes towards it. The fact that it was absolutely a secret, suspected by no one, made this more possible; for there was no gleam of cognizance in any eye meeting hers which could awaken even a momentary recollection of it. It seemed so certain that her husband was dead to every one but herself, that she came at last almost to believe that it was true.

And was it not most likely to be true? Through all these long years there had come no hint to her in any way that he was living. She had never seen or heard of any man lingering about her home where she and her children lived, all whom Roland loved, and loved so passionately. Certainly she had made no effort to discover whether he was yet alive; but though it would be well for her if he was dead—a cause of rest almost amounting to satisfaction—it was not likely that he would remain content with unbroken and complete ignorance of how she and her children were faring. If he had been living, surely he would have given her some sign.

There was a terrible duty now lying in her path. Before she could give her consent to Felix marrying Alice, she must ascertain positively if her husband was dead. Should it be so, her secret was safe, and would die with her. Nobody need ever know of this fraud, so successfully carried out. But if not? Then she knew in herself that her lips could never confess the sin in which she had shared; and nothing would remain for her to do but to oppose with all the energy and persistence possible the marriage either of her son or daughter. And she fully believed that neither of them would marry against her will.

Her health had not permitted her hitherto to make the exertion necessary for ascertaining this fact, on which her whole future depended—hers and her children's. The physician whom she had consulted in London had urged upon her the imperative necessity of avoiding all excitement and fatigue, and had ordered her down to this dull little village of Freshwater, where not even a brass band on the unfinished pier or the arrival of an excursion steamer could disturb or agitate her. She had nothing to do but to sit on the quiet downs, where no sound could startle her, and no spectacle flutter her, until the sea-breezes had brought back her usual tone of health.

How long this promised restoration was in coming! Phebe, who watched for it anxiously, saw but little sign of it. Felicita was more silent than ever, more withdrawn into herself, gazing for hours upon the changeful surface of the sea with absent eyes, through which the brain was not looking out. Neither sound nor sight reached the absorbed soul, that was wandering through some intricate mazes to which Phebe had no clue. But no color came to Felicita's pale face, and no light into her dim eyes. There was a painful and weird feeling often in Phebe's heart that Felicita herself was not there; only the fair, frail form, which was as insensible as a corpse, until this spirit came back to it. At such times Phebe was impelled to touch her, and speak to her, and call her back again, though it might be to irritability and displeasure.

"Phebe," said Felicita, one day when they sat on the cliff, so near the edge that nothing but the sea lay within the range of their sight, "how should you feel if, instead of helping a fellow-creature to save himself from drowning, you had thrust him back into the water, and left him, sure that he would perish?"

"But I cannot tell you how I should feel," answered Phebe, "because I could never do it. It makes me shudder to think of such a thing. No human being could do it."

"But if you had thrust the one fellow-creature nearest to you, the one who loved you the most," pursued Felicita, "into sin, down into a deeper gulf than he could have fallen into but for you—"

"My dear, my dear!" cried Phebe, interrupting her in a tone of the tenderest pity. "Oh! I know now what is preying upon you. Because Felix loves Alice it has brought back all the sorrowful past to you, and you are letting it kill you. Listen! Let me speak this once, and then I will never speak again, if you wish it. Canon Pascal knows it all; I told him. And Felix knows it, and he loves you more than ever; you are dearer to him a hundred times than you were before. And he forgives his father—fully. God has cast his sin as a stone into the depths of the sea, to be remembered against him no more forever!"

A slight flush crept over Felicita's pale face. It was a relief to her to learn that Canon Pascal and Felix knew so much of the truth. The darker secret must be hidden still in the depths of her heart until she found out whether she was altogether free from the chance of discovery.

"It was right they should know," she said in a low and dreamy tone; "and Canon Pascal makes no difficulty of it?"

"Canon Pascal said to me," answered Phebe, "that your noble life and the fame you had won atoned for the error of which Felix and Hilda's father had been guilty. He said they were your children, brought up under your training and example, not their father's. Why do you dwell so bitterly upon the past? It is all forgotten now."

"Not by me," murmured Felicita, "nor by you, Phebe."

"No; I have never forgotten him," cried Phebe, with a passionate sorrow in her voice. "How good he was to me, and to all about him! Yes, he was guilty of a sin before God and against man; I know it. But oh! if he had only suffered the penalty, and come back to us again, for us to comfort him, and to help him to live down the shame! Possibly we could not have done it in Riversborough; I do not know; but I would have gone with you, as your servant, to the ends of the earth, and you would have lived happy days again—happier than the former days. And he would have proved himself a good man, in spite of his sin; a Christian man, whom Christ would not have been ashamed to own."

"No, no," said Felicita; "that is impossible. I never loved Roland; can you believe that, Phebe?"

"Yes," she answered in a whisper, and with downcast eyes.

"Not as I think of love," continued Felicita in a dreary voice. "I have tried to love you all; but you seem so far away from me, as if I could never touch you. Even Felix and Hilda, they are like phantom children, who do not warm my heart, or gladden it, as other mothers are made happy by their children. Sometimes I have dreamed of what life would have been if I had given myself to some man for whom I would have forfeited the world, and counted the loss as nothing. But that is past now, and I feel old. There is nothing more before me; all is gray and flat and cold, a desolate monotony of years, till death comes."

"You make me unhappy," said Phebe. "Ought we not to love God first, and man for God's sake? There is no passion in that; but there is inexhaustible faithfulness and tenderness."

"How far away from me you are!" answered Felicita with a faint smile.

She turned her sad face again towards the sea, and sat silent, watching the flitting sails pass by, but holding Phebe's hand fast in her own, as if she craved her companionship. Phebe, too, was silent, the tears dimming her blue eyes and blotting out the scene before her. Her heart was very heavy and troubled for Felicita.

"Will you go to Engelberg with me by-and-by?" asked Felicita suddenly, but in a calm and tranquil tone.

"To Engelberg!" echoed Phebe.

"I must go there before Felix thinks of marrying," she answered in short and broken sentences; "but it cannot be till spring. Yet I cannot write again until I have been there; the thought of it haunts me intolerably. Sometimes, nay, often, the word Engelberg has slipped from my pen unawares when I have tried to write; so I shall do no more work till I have fulfilled this duty; but I will rest another few months. When I have been to Engelberg again, for the last time, I shall be not happy, but less miserable."

"I will go with you wherever you wish," said Phebe.

It was so great a relief to have said this much to Phebe, to have broken through so much of the icy reserve which froze her heart, that Felicita's spirits at once grew more cheerful. The dreaded words had been uttered, and the plan was settled; though its fulfilment was postponed till spring; a reprieve to Felicita. She regained health and strength rapidly, and returned to London so far recovered that her physician gave her permission to return to work.

But she did not wish to take up her work again. It had long ago lost the charm of novelty to her, and though circumstances had compelled her to write, or to live upon her marriage settlement, which in her eyes was to live upon the proceeds of a sin successfully carried out, her writing itself had become tedious to her. "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity!" and there is much vexation of spirit, as well as weariness of the flesh, in the making of many books. She had made enemies who were spiteful, and friends who were exacting; she, who felt equally the irksomeness of petty enmities and of small friendships, which, like gnats buzzing monotonously about her, were now and then ready to sting. The sting itself might be trivial, but it was irritating.

Felicita had soon found out how limited is the circle of fame for even a successful writer. For one person who would read a book, there were fifty who would go to hear a famous singer or actor, and a hundred who would crowd to see a clever acrobat. As she read more she discovered that what she had fondly imagined were ideas originated by her own intellect, was, in reality, the echo only of thought long since given to mankind by other minds, in other words, often better than her own. Her own silent claim to genius was greatly modified; she was humbler than she had been. But she knew painfully that her name was now a hundred-fold better known than it had been while she was yet only the wife of a Riversborough banker. All her work for the last fourteen years had placed it more and more prominently before the public. Any scandal attaching to it now would be blazoned farther and wider, in deeper and more enduring characters, than if her life as an author had been a failure.

The subtle hope, very real, vague as it was, that her husband was in truth dead, gathered strength. The silence that had engulfed him had been so profound that it seemed impossible he should still be treading the same earth as herself, and wearing through its slow and commonplace days, sleeping and waking, eating and drinking like other men. Felicita was not superstitious, but there was in her that deep-rooted, instinctive sense of mystery in this double life of ours, dividing our time into sleeping and waking hours, which is often apt to make our dreams themselves omens of importance. She had never dreamed of Roland as she did of those belonging to her who had already passed into the invisible world about us. His spirit was not free, perhaps, from its earthly fetters so as to be able to visit her, and haunt her sleeping fancies. But now she began to dream of him frequently, and often in the daytime flashes of memory darted vividly across her brain, lighting up the dark forgotten past, and recalling to her some word of his, or a glance merely. It was an inward persecution from which she could not escape, but it seemed to her to indicate that her persecutor was no more a denizen of this world.