To get rid of these haunting memories as much as possible, she made such a change in her mode of life as astonished all about her. She no longer shut herself up in her library; as she had told Phebe, she resolved to write no more, nor attempt to write, until she had been to Engelberg. She seemed wishful to attract friends to her, and she renewed old acquaintanceships with members of her own family which she had allowed to drop during these many years. No sooner was it evident that Felicita Sefton was willing to come out of the extremely quiet and solitary life she had led hitherto, and take her place in society both as Lord Riversdale's daughter and as the author of many popular books, than the current of fashion set towards her. She was still a remarkably lovely woman, possessing irresistible attractions in her refined face and soft yet distant manners, as of one walking in a trance, and seeing and hearing things invisible and inaudible to less favored mortals. Quite unconsciously to herself she became the lion of the season, when the next season opened. She had been so difficult to know, that as soon as she was willing to be known invitations poured in upon her, and her house was invaded by a throng of visitors, many of them more or less distantly related to her.

To Hilda this new life was one of unexpected and exquisite delight. Phebe, also, with her genuine interest in her fellow-creatures, and her warm sympathy in all human joys and sorrows, enjoyed the change, though it perplexed her, and caused her to watch Felicita with anxiety. Felix saw less of it than any one, for he was down in Essex, leading the tranquil and not very laborious life of a country curate, chafing a little now and then at his inactivity, yet blissful beyond words in the close daily intercourse with Alice. There was no talk of their marriage, but they were young and together. Their happiness was untroubled.



CHAPTER XVI.

THE VOICE OF THE DEAD.

In his lonely garret in the East End, Jean Merle was living in an isolation more complete even than that of Engelberg. There he had known at least the names of those about him, and their faces had grown familiar to him. More than once he had been asked to help when help was sorely needed, and he had felt, though not quite consciously, that there was still a link or two binding him to his fellow-men. But here, an unit among millions, who hustled him at every step, breathed the same air, and shared the common light with him, he was utterly alone. "Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to man," and no man could be more completely isolated than he.

Strangely enough, his Swiss proclivities seemed to have fallen from him like a worn-out garment. The narrow, humble existence of his peasant forefathers, to which he had so readily adapted himself, was no longer tolerable in his eyes. He felt all the force and energy of the life of the great city which surrounded him. His birthright as an Englishman presented itself to his imagination with a splendor and importance that it had never possessed before, even in those palmy days when it was no unthought-of honor that he might some day take his place in the House of Commons. He called himself Jean Merle, for no other name belonged to him; but he felt himself to be an Englishman again, to whom the life of a Swiss peasant would be a purgatory.

Other natural instincts were asserting themselves. He had been a man of genial, social habits, glad to gather round him smiling faces and friendly voices; and this bias of his was stirring into life and shaking off its long stupor. He longed, with intense longing, for some mortal ear into which he could pour the story of his sins and sufferings, and for some human tongue to utter friendly words of counsel to him. It was not enough to pour out his confessions before God in agonizing prayer; that he had done, and was doing daily. But it was not all. The natural yearning for man's forgiveness, spoken in living human speech, grew stronger within him. There was no longer a chance for him to make even a partial reparation of the wrong he had committed; he felt himself without courage to begin the long conflict again. What his soul hungered for now was to see his life through another man's eyes.

But his money, economize it as he might, was slowly melting away. Unless he could get work—and all his efforts to find it failed—it would not do to remain in England. At Engelberg had secured a position as a wood carver, and his livelihood was assured. There, too, he possessed a scanty knowledge of the neighbors, and they of him. It would be his wisest course to return there, to forget what he had been, and to draw nearer to him the simple and ignorant people, who might yet be won over to regard him with good-will. This must be done before he found himself penniless as well as friendless. He set aside a certain sum, when that was spent he must once more be an exile.

Until then, it was his life to pace to and fro along the streets of London. Somewhere in this vast labyrinth there was a home to which he had a right; a hearth where he could plant himself and claim it for his own. He was master of it, and of a wife, and children; he, the lonely, almost penniless man. It would be a small thing to him to pay the penalty the law could demand of him. A few years more or less in Dartmoor Prison would be nothing to him, if at the end of them he saw a home waiting for him to return to it. But he never sought to look at the exterior even of that spot to which he had a right. He made no effort to see Felicita.

He stayed till he touched his last shilling. It was already winter, and the short, dark days, with their thick fogs, made the wintry months little better than one long night. To-morrow he must leave England, never to return to it. He strayed aimlessly about the gloomy streets, letting his feet bear him whither they would, until he found himself looking down through the iron railings upon the deserted yard in front of the Houses of Parliament. The dark mass of the building loomed heavily through the yellow fog, but beyond it came the sound of bells ringing in the invisible Abbey. It was the hour for morning prayer, and Jean Merle sauntered listlessly onwards until he reached the northern entrance and turned into the transept. The dim daylight scarcely lit up the lofty arches in the roof or the farther end of the long aisles, but he gave no heed to either. He sank down on a chair and bent his gray head on the back of the chair before him; the sweet solemn chanting of the white-robed choristers echoed under the roof, and the sacred and soothing tones of prayer floated pest him. But he did not move or lift his head. He sat there absorbed in his own thoughts, and the hours seemed only as floating minutes to him. Visitors came and went, chatting close beside him, and the vergers, with their quiet footsteps, came one by one to look at this motionless, poverty-stricken form, whose face no man could see, but nobody disturbed him. He had a right to be there, as still, and as solitary, and as silent as he pleased.

But when Canon Pascal came up the long aisle to evening prayers and saw again the same gray head bowed down in the same despondent attitude as he had left it in the morning, he could scarcely refrain himself from pausing then and there, before the evening service proceeded, to speak to this man. He had caught a momentary glimpse of his face, and it had haunted him in his study in the interval, until he had half reproached himself for not answering to that silent appeal its wretchedness had made. But he had had no expectation of seeing it again.

It was dark by the time the evening service was over, and Canon Pascal hastily divested himself of his surplice, that he might not seem to approach the stranger as a clergyman, but rather as an equal. The Abbey was being cleared of its visitors, and the lights were being put out one by one, when he sat down on the seat next to Jean Merle's, and laid his hand with a gentle pressure on his arm. Jean Merle started and lifted up his head. It was too dark for them to see each other well; but Canon Pascal's voice was full of friendly urgency.

"They are going to close the Abbey," he said; "and you've been here all day, without food, my friend. Is there any special reason why you should pass a long, dark winter's day in such a manner? I would be glad to serve you if I can. Perhaps you are a stranger in London?"

"I have been seeking the guidance of God," answered Jean Merle, in a bewildered yet unutterably sorrowful voice.

"That is good," replied Canon Pascal; "that is the best. But it is good also at times to seek man's guidance. It is God, doubtless, who has sent me to you. As His servant, I earnestly desire to serve you."

"If you would listen to me under a solemn seal of secrecy!" cried Jean Merle.

"Are you a Catholic?" asked Canon Pascal. "Is it a confessor you want?"

"I am not a Catholic," he answered; "but there is a strong desire in my soul to confess. My burden would be lighter if any man would share it, so far as to keep my secret."

"Does it touch the life of any fellow-creature?" inquired Canon Pascal; "is there any great crime in it?"

"No; not what you are thinking," he said; "there is sin in it; ay, and crime; but not a crime like that."

"Then I will listen to it under a solemn promise of secrecy, whatever it may be," replied Canon Pascal. "But the vergers are waiting to close the Abbey. Come with me; my home is close by, within the precincts."

Jean Merle had risen obediently as he spoke, but, exhausted and weary, he staggered as he stood upon his feet. Canon Pascal drew his arm within his own. This simple action was to him full of a friendliness to which he had been long a stranger. To clasp another man's hand, to walk arm-in-arm with him, he felt keenly how much of implied brotherhood was in them. He was ready to go anywhere with Canon Pascal, almost as a child guided and cared for by an older and wiser brother.

They passed out of the Abbey into the cloisters, dimly lighted by the lamps, which had been lit in good time this dark November evening. The low, black-browed arches, which had echoed to the footsteps of sorrow-stricken men for more than eight hundred years, resounded to their tread as they walked beneath them in silence. Jean Merle suffered himself to be led without a question, like one in a dream. There seemed some faint reminiscence from the past of this man, with his harsh features, and kindly, genial expression, the deep-set eyes, beaming with a benign light from under the rugged eyebrows, and the firm yet friendly pressure of his guiding arm; and his mind was groping about the dark labyrinth of memory to seize his former knowledge of him, if there had ever been any. There was a vague apprehension about him lest he should discover that this friend was no stranger, and his tongue must be tied, even though what he was about to say would be under the inviolable seal of secrecy.

They had not far to go, for Canon Pascal turned aside into a little square, open to the black November sky, and stopping at a door in the gray, old walls, opened it with a latch-key. They entered a narrow passage, and Canon Pascal turned at once to his study, which was close by. As he pushed open the door, he said, "Go in, my friend; I will be with you in a moment."

Jean Merle saw before him an old-fashioned room with a low ceiling. There was no light besides the warm, red glow of a fire, which was no longer burning with yellow flame, but which lit up sufficiently the figure of a woman seated on a low stool on the hearth, with her head resting on the hand that shaded her eyes. It was a figure familiar to him in his old life—that life which lay on the other side of Roland Sefton's grave. He had seen the same well-shaped head, with its soft brown hair, and the round outline of the averted cheek and chin, a thousand times in old Marlowe's cottage on the uplands, sitting in the red firelight as she was sitting now. All the intervening years were swept away in an instant—his bitter anguish and unavailing repentance—the long solitude and gnawing remorse—all was swept clean away from his mind. He felt the strength and freshness of his boyhood come back to him, as if the breeze of the uplands was blowing softly yet keenly across his throbbing and fevered temples. Even his voice caught back for the moment the ring of his early youth as he stood on the threshold, forgetting all else but the sight that filled his eyes. "Phebe!" he cried; "little Phebe Marlowe!"

The cry startled Phebe, but she did not move. It was the voice of one long since dead that rang in her ears—dead, and faithfully mourned over; and every nerve tingled, and her heart seemed to stay its beating. Roland Sefton's voice! She did not doubt it or mistake it. The call had been too real. She had answered to it too many times to be mistaken now. In those days of utter silence, when dumb signs only had passed between her and her father, Roland's pleasant voice had sounded too gladly in her ears ever to be forgotten or confounded with another. But how could she hear it now? The voice of the dead! how could it reach her? A strange pang of mingled joy and terror paralyzed her. She sat motionless and bewildered, with a thrill of passionate expectation quivering through her. Let Roland speak again; she could not answer his first call!

"Phebe!" She heard the cry again; but this time the voice was low, and lamentable, and despairing. For in the few seconds he had been standing, arrested on the threshold, the whole past had flitted through his brain in dismal procession. She lifted herself up slowly and mechanically from her low seat, and turned her face reluctantly towards the spot from which the startling call had come. In the dusky, red light stood the form of the one friend to whom she had been faithful with the utter faithfulness of her nature. Whence he came she knew not—she was afraid of knowing. But he was there, himself, and not another like him. There was a change, she could see that dimly; but not such a change as could disguise him from her. Of late, whilst she had been painting his portrait from memory, every recollection of him had been revived with keener vividness. Yet the terror of beholding him again on this side of death struck her dumb. She stretched out her hands towards him, but she could not speak.

"I must speak to Phebe Marlowe alone," said Jean Merle to Canon Pascal, and speaking in a tone of irresistible earnestness. "I have that to say to her which no one else can hear. She is God's messenger to me."

"Shall I leave you with this stranger, Phebe?" asked Canon Pascal.

She made a gesture simply; her lips were too parched to open.

"My dear girl, I will stay, if you please," he said again.

"No," she breathed, in a voice scarcely audible.

"There is a bell close at your hand," he went on, "and I shall be within hearing of it. I will come myself if you ring it however faintly. You know this man?"

"Yes," she answered.

She saw him look across at her with an encouraging smile; and then the door was shut, and she was alone with her mysterious visitor.



CHAPTER XVII.

NO PLACE FOR REPENTANCE.

They stood silent for a few moments;—moments which seemed hours to Phebe. The stranger—for who could be so great a stranger as one who had been many years dead?—had advanced only a step or two from the threshold, and paused as if some invisible barrier was set up between them. She had shrunk back, and stood leaning against the wall for the support her trembling limbs needed. It was with a vehement effort that at last she spoke.

"Roland Sefton!" she faltered.

"Yes!" he answered, "I am that most miserable man."

"But you died," she said with quivering lips, "fourteen years ago."

"No, Phebe, no," he replied; "would to God I had died then."

Once more an agony of mingled fear and joy overwhelmed her. This dear voice, so lamentable and hopeless, so well remembered in all its tones, told her that he was still living, whom she had mourned over so many years. But what could this mystery mean? What had he passed through? What was about to happen now? A tumult of thoughts thronged to her brain. But clearest of all came the assurance that he was alive, standing there, desolate, changed, and friendless. She ran to him and clasped his hands in hers; stooping down and kissing them, those hard worn hands, which he left unresistingly in her grasp. These loving, and deferential caresses belonged to the time when she was a humble country girl, and he the friend very far above her.

"Come closer to the fire, your hands are cold, Mr. Roland," she said, speaking in the old long-disused accent of her early days, as she might have spoken to him while she was yet a child. She threw a few logs on the fire, and drew up Canon Pascal's chair to the hearth for him. She felt spell-bound; and as if she had been suddenly thrust back upon those old times.

"I am no longer Roland Sefton," he said, sinking down into the chair; "he died, as you say, many a long year ago. Do not light the lamp, Phebe; let us talk by the firelight."

The flicker of the flames creeping round the dry wood played upon his face, and her eyes were fastened on it. Could this man really be Roland Sefton, or was she being tricked by her fancy? Here was a scarred and wrinkled face, blistered and burnt by the summer's sun, and cut and frost-bitten by the winter's cold; the hair was gray and ragged, and the eyes far sunk in the head met her gaze with a despairing and uneasy glance, as if he shrank from her close scrutiny. His bowed shoulders and hands roughened by toil, and worn-out mechanic's dress, were such a change, that perhaps, she acknowledged it reluctantly to herself, if he had not spoken as he did she might have passed him by undiscovered.

"I am Jean Merle," he said, "not Roland Sefton."

"Jean Merle?" she repeated in a low, bewildered tone, "not Roland Sefton, but Jean Merle?"

But she could not be bewildered or in doubt much longer. This was Roland indeed, the hero of her life, come back to her a broken-down, desolate, and hopeless man. She knelt down on the hearth beside him, and laid her hand compassionately on his.

"But you are Roland himself to me!" she cried. "Oh! be quick, and tell me all about it. Why did we ever think you were dead?"

"It was best for them all," he answered. "God knows I believed it was best. But it was a second sin, worse than the first, Phebe. I did the man who died no wrong, for he told me as he lay dying that he had no friends to grieve for him, and no property to leave. All he wanted was a decent grave; and he has it, and my name with it. The grave at Engelberg contains a stranger. And I, Jean Merle, have taken charge of it."

"Oh!" cried Phebe, with a pang of dread, "how will Felicita bear it?"

"Felicita has known it; she consented to it," said Jean Merle. "If she had uttered one word against my desperate plan, I should have recoiled from it. To be dead whilst you are yet in the body; to have eyes to see and ears to hear with, and a thinking brain and a hungry heart, whilst there is no sign, or sound, or memory, or love from your former life; you cannot conceive what that is, Phebe. I was dead, yet I was too keenly alive in Jean Merle, the poor wood-carver and miser. They thought I was imbecile; and I was almost a madman. I could not tear myself away from the grave where Roland Sefton was buried; but oh! what I have suffered!"

He ended with a long shuddering sigh, which pierced Phebe to the heart. The joy of seeing him again was vanishing in the sight of his suffering; but the thought uppermost in her mind was of Felicita.

"And she has known all along that you were not dead?" she said, in a tone of awe.

"Yes, Felicita knew," he answered.

"And has she never seen you, never written to you?" she asked.

"She knows nothing of me," he replied. "I was to be dead to her, and to every one else. We parted forever in Engelberg fourteen years ago this very month. Perhaps she believes me to be dead in reality. But I could live no longer without knowing something of you all, of Felix and Hilda; and I came over to England in August. I have seen all of you, except Felicita."

"Oh! it was wicked! it was cruel!" sobbed Phebe, shivering. "Your mother died, believing she was going to rejoin you; and I, oh! how I have mourned for you!"

"Have you, Phebe?" he said sorrowfully; "but Felicita has been saved from shame, and has been successful. She is too famous now for me to retrace my steps, and get back into truthfulness. I can find no place for repentance, let me seek it ever so carefully and with tears."

"But you have repented?" she whispered.

"Before God? yes!" he answered, "and I believe He has forgiven me. But there is no way by which I can retrieve the past. I have forfeited everything, and I am now shut out even from the duties of life. What ought I to have done, Phebe? There was this way to save my mother, and my children, and Felicita; and I took it. It has prospered for all of them; they hold a different position in the world this day than they could have done if I had lived."

"In this world, yes!" answered Phebe, with a touch of scorn in her voice; "but cannot you see what you have done for Felicita? Oh! it would have been better for her to have endured the shame of your first sin, than bear such a burden of guilt. And you might have outlived the disgrace. There are Christian people in the world who can forgive sin, even as Christ forgives it. Even my poor father forgave it; and Mr. Clifford, he is repenting now that he did not forgive you; it weighs him down in his old age. It would have been better for you and Felicita if you had borne the penalty of your crime."

"And our children, Phebe?" he said.

"Could not God have made it up to them?" she asked. "Did He make it necessary for you to sin again on their account? Oh! if you had only trusted Him! If you had only waited to see how Christ could turn even the sins of the father into blessings for his children! They have missed you; it may be, I cannot see clearly, they must miss you now all their lives. It would break their hearts to learn all this. Whether they must know it, I cannot tell."

"To what end should they know it?" he said. "Don't you see, Phebe, that the distinction Felicita has won binds us to keep this secret? It cannot be disclosed either to her or to them. I came to tell it to the man who brought me here under a seal of secrecy."

"To Canon Pascal?" she exclaimed.

"Pascal?" he repeated, "ay? I remember him now. It would have been terrible to have told it to him."

"Let me think about it," said Phebe, "it has come too suddenly upon me. There must be something we ought to do, but I cannot see it yet. I must have time to recollect it all. And yet I am afraid to let you go, lest you should disappear again, and all this should seem like a dreadful dream."

"You care for me still, Phebe?" he answered mournfully. "No, I shall not disappear from you; I shall hold fast by you, now you have seen me again. If that poor wretch in hell who lifted up his eyes, being in torments, had caught sight of some pitying angel, who would now and then dip the tip of her finger in water and cool his tongue, would he have disappeared from her vision? Wouldn't he rather have had a horrible dread lest she should disappear? But you will not forsake me, Phebe?"

"Never!" replied Phebe, with an intense and mournful earnestness.

"Then I will go," he said, rising reluctantly to his feet. The deep tones of the Abbey clock were striking for the second time since he had entered Canon Pascal's study, and they had been left in uninterrupted conversation. It was time for him to go; yet it seemed to him as if he had still so much to pour into Phebe's ear, that many hours would not give him time enough. Unconstrained speech had proved a source of ineffable solace and strength to him. He had been dying of thirst, and he had found a spring of living waters. To Phebe, and to her alone, he was still a living man, unless sometimes Felicita thought of him.

"If you are still my friend, knowing all," he said, "I shall no longer despair. When will you see me again?"

"I will come to morning service in the Abbey to-morrow," she answered.



CHAPTER XVIII.

WITHIN AND WITHOUT.

After speaking to Canon Pascal for a few minutes, with an agitation and a reserve which he could not but observe, Phebe left the house to go home. In one of the darkest corners of the cloisters she caught sight of the figure of Jean Merle, watching for her to come out. For an instant Phebe paused, as if to speak to him once more; but her heart was over-fraught with conflicting emotions, whilst bewildering thoughts oppressed her brain. She longed for a solitary walk homewards, along the two or three miles of a crowded thoroughfare, where she could how feel as much alone as she had ever done on the solitary uplands about her birth-place. She had always delighted to ramble about the streets alone after nightfall, catching brief glimpses of the great out-door population, who were content if they could get a shelter for their heads during the few, short hours they could give to sleep, without indulging in the luxury of a home. When talking to them she could return to the rustic and homely dialect of her childhood; and from her own early experience she could understand their wants, and look at them from their stand-point, whilst feeling for them a sympathy and pity intensified by the education which had lifted her above them.

But to-night she passed along the busy streets both deaf and dumb, mechanically choosing the right way between the Abbey and her home, nearly three miles away. There was only one circumstance of which she was conscious—that Jean Merle was following her. Possibly he was afraid in the depths of his heart that she would fail him when she came to deliberately consider all he had told her. He wronged her, she said to herself indignantly. Still, whenever she turned her head she caught sight of his tall, bent figure and gray head, stealing after her at some distance, but never losing her. So mournful was it to Phebe, to see her oldest and her dearest friend thus dogging her footsteps, that once or twice she paused at a street corner to give him time to overtake her; but he kept aloof. He wished only to see where she lived, for there also lived Felicita and Hilda.

She turned at last into the square where their house was. It was brilliantly lighted up, for Felicita was having one of her rare receptions that evening, and in another hour or two the rooms would be filled with guests. It was too early yet, and Hilda was playing on her piano in the drawing-room, the merry notes ringing out into the quiet night. There was a side door to Phebe's studio, by which she could go in and out at pleasure, and she stood at it trying to fit her latch-key into the lock with her trembling hands. Looking back she saw Jean Merle some little distance away, leaning against the railings that enclosed the Square garden.

"Oh! I must run back to him! I must speak to him again!" she cried to her own heart. In another instant she was at his side, with her hands clasping his.

"Oh!" she sobbed, "what can I do for you? This is too miserable for you; and for me as well. Tell me what I can do."

"Nothing," he answered. "Why, you make me feel as if I had sinned again in telling you all this. I ought not to have troubled your happy heart with my sorrow."

"It was not you," she said, "you did not even come to tell me; God brought you. I can bear it. But oh! to see you shut out, and inside, yonder, Hilda is playing, and Felix, perhaps, is there. They will be singing by-and-by, and never know who is standing outside, in the foggy night, listening to them."

Her voice broke into sobs, but Jean Merle did not notice them.

"And Felicita?" he said.

Phebe could not answer him for weeping. Just yet she could hardly bring herself to think distinctly of Felicita; though in fact her thoughts were full of her. She ran back to her private door, and this time opened it readily. There was a low light in the studio from a shaded lamp standing on the chimney-piece, which made the hearth bright, but left all the rest of the room in shadow. Phebe threw off her bonnet and cloak with a very heavy and troubled sigh.

"What can make you sigh, Phebe?" asked a low-toned and plaintive voice. In the chair by the fire-place, pushed out of the circle of the light, she saw Felicita leaning back, and looking up at her. The beauty of her face had never struck harshly upon Phebe until now; at this moment it was absolutely painful to her. The rich folds of her velvet dress, and the soft and costly lace of her head-dress, distinct from though resembling a widow's cap, set off both her face and figure to the utmost advantage. Phebe's eyes seemed to behold her more distinctly and vividly than they had done for some years past; for she was looking through them with a dark background for what she saw in her own brain. She was a strikingly beautiful woman; but the thought of what anguish and dread had been concealed under her reserved and stately air, so cold yet so gentle, filled Phebe's soul with a sudden terror. What an awful life of self-approved, stoical falsehood she had been living! She could see the man, from whom she had just parted, standing without, homeless and friendless, on the verge of pennilessness; a dead man in a living world, cut off from all the ties and duties of the home and the society he loved. But to Phebe he did not appear so wretched as Felicita was.

She sank down on a seat near Felicita, with such a feeling of heart-sickness and heart-faintness as she had never experienced before. The dreariness and perplexity of the present stretched before her into the coming years. For almost the first time in her life she felt worn-out; physically weary and exhausted, as if her strength had been overtaxed. Her childhood on the fresh, breezy uplands, and her happy, tranquil temperament had hitherto kept her in perfect health. But now she felt as if the sins of those whom she had loved so tenderly and loyally touched the very springs of her life. She could have shared any other burden with them, and borne it with an unbroken spirit and an uncrushed heart. But such a sin as this, so full of woe and bewilderment to them all, entangled her soul also in its poisonous web.

"Why did you sigh so bitterly?" asked Felicita again.

"The world is so full of misery," she answered, in a tremulous and troubled voice; "its happiness is such a mockery!"

"Have you found that out at last, dear Phebe?" said Felicita. "I have been telling you so for years. The Son of Man fainting under the Cross—that is the true emblem of human life. Even He had not strength enough to bear His cross to the place called Golgotha. Whenever I think of what most truly represents our life here, I see Jesus, faltering along the rough road, with Simon behind Him, whom they compelled to bear His cross."

"He fainted under the sins of the world," murmured Phebe. "It is possible to bear the sorrows of others; but oh! it is hard to carry their sins."

"We all find that out," said Felicita, her face growing wan and white even to the lips. "Can one man do evil without the whole world suffering for it? Does the effect of a sin ever die out? What is done cannot be undone through all eternity. There is the wretchedness of it, Phebe."

"I never felt it as I do now," she answered.

"Because you have kept yourself free from earthly ties," said Felicita mournfully; "you have neither husband nor child to increase your power of suffering a hundred-fold. I am entering upon another term of tribulation in Felix and Hilda. If I had only been like you, dear Phebe, I could have passed through life as happily as you do; but my life has never belonged to myself; it has been forced to run in channels made by others."

Somewhere in the house behind them a door was left open accidentally, and the sound of Hilda's piano and of voices singing broke in upon the quiet studio. Phebe listened to them, and thought of the desolate, broken-hearted man without, who was listening too. The clear young voices of their children fell upon his ears as upon Felicita's; so near they were to one another, yet so far apart. She shivered and drew nearer to the fire.

"I feel as cold as if I was a poor outcast in the streets," she said.

"And I, too," responded Felicita; "but oh! Phebe, do not you lose heart and courage, like me. You have always seemed in the sunshine, and I have looked up to you and felt cheered. Don't come down into the darkness to me."

Phebe could not answer, for the darkness was closing round her. Until now there had happened no perplexity in her life which made it difficult to decide upon the right or the wrong. But here was come a coil. The long years had reconciled her to Roland's death, and made the memory of him sacred and sorrowfully sweet, to be brooded over in solitary hours in the silent depths of her loyal heart. But he was alive again, with no right to be alive, having no explanation to give which could reinstate him in his old position. And Felicita? Oh! what a cruel, unwomanly wrong Felicita had been guilty of! She could not command her voice to speak again.

"I must go," said Felicita, at last. "I wish I had not invited visitors for to-night."

"I cannot come in this evening," Phebe answered; "but Felix is there, and Canon Pascal is coming. You will do very well without me."

She breathed more freely when Felicita was gone. The dimly-lighted studio, with the canvases she was at work upon, and the pictures she had painted hanging on the walls, and her easels standing as she had left them three or four hours ago, when the early dusk came on, soothed her agitated spirit now she was alone. She moved slowly about, putting everything into its place, and feeling as if her thoughts grew more orderly as she did so. When all was done she opened the outer door stealthily, and peeped out. Yes; he was there, leaning against the railings, and looking up at the brilliantly-lighted windows. Carriages were driving up and setting down Felicita's guests. Phebe's heart cried out against the contrast between the lives of these two. She longed to run out and stand beside him in the darkness and dampness of the November night. But what good could she do? she asked bitterly. She did not dare even to ask him in to sit beside her studio fire. The same roof could not cover him and Felicita, without unspeakable pain to him.

It was late before the house was quiet, and long after midnight when the last light was put out. That was in Phebe's bedroom, and once again she looked out, and saw the motionless figure, looking black amidst the general darkness, as if it had never stirred since she had seen it first. But whilst she was gazing, with quivering mouth and tear-dimmed eyes, a policeman came up and spoke to Jean Merle, giving him an authoritative shake, which seemed to arouse him. He moved gently away, closely followed by the policeman till he passed out of her sight.

There was no sleep for Phebe; she did not want to sleep. All night long her brain was awake and busy; but it found no way out of the coil. Who can make a crooked thing straight? or undo that which has been done?



CHAPTER XIX.

IN HIS FATHER'S HOUSE.

When Phebe entered Westminster Abbey the next day the morning service was already begun. Upon the bench nearest the door sat a working-man, in worn-out clothes, whose gray hair was long and ragged, and whose whole appearance was one of poverty and suffering. She was passing by, when a gleam of recognition in the dark and sunken eyes of this poor man arrested her. Could he possibly be Roland Sefton? The night before she had seen him only in a friendly obscurity, which concealed the ravages time, and sorrow, and labor had effected; but now the daylight, in revealing them, cast a chill shadow of doubt into her heart. It was his voice she had known and acknowledged the night before; but now he was silent, and, revealed by the daylight, she felt troubled and distrustful. Such a man she might have met a thousand times without once recalling to her memory the handsome, manly presence and prosperous bearing of Roland Sefton.

Yet she sat down beside him in answer to that appealing gleam in his eyes, and as his well-known voice joined hers in the responses to the prayers, she acknowledged him again in her heart of hearts. And now all thought of the sacred place, and of the worship she was engaged in, fled from her mind. She was a girl at home again, dwelling in the silent society of her dumb father, with this voice of Roland Sefton's coming to break the stillness from time to time, and to fill it with that sweetest music, the sound of human speech. If he had lost every vestige of resemblance to his former self, his voice only, calling "Phebe" as he had done the evening before, must have betrayed him to her. Not an accent of it had been forgotten.

To Jean Merle Phebe Marlowe was little altered, save that she had grown from a simple rustic maiden into a cultivated and refined woman. The sweet and gentle face beside him, with the deep peaceful blue of her eyes, and the sensitive mouth so ready to break into a smile, was the same he had seen when, on that terrible evening so many years ago, he had craved her help to escape from his dreaded punishment. "I will help you, even to dying for you and yours," she had said. He remembered vividly how mournfully the girlish fervor of her manner had impressed him. Even now he had no one else to help him; this woman's little hand alone could reach him in the gulf where he lay; only the simple, pitiful wisdom of her faithful heart could find a way for him out of this misery of his into some place of safety and peace. He was willing to follow wherever she might guide him.

"I can see only one duty before us," she said, when the service was over, and they stood together before one of the monuments in the Abbey; "I think Mr. Clifford ought to know."

"What will he do, Phebe?" asked Jean Merle. "God knows if I had only myself to think of I would go into a convict-prison as thankfully as if it was the gate of heaven. It would be as the gate of heaven to me if I could pay the penalty of my crime. But there are Felicita and my children; and the greater shock and shame to them of my conviction now."

"Yet if Mr. Clifford demanded the penalty it must even now be paid," answered Phebe; "but he will not. One reason why he ought to know is that he mourns over you still, day and night, as if he had been the chief cause of your death. He reproaches himself with his implacability both towards you and his son. But even if the old resentment should awaken, it is right you should run the risk. Why need it be known to any one but us two that Felicita knew you were still alive?"

"If we could save her and the children I should be satisfied," said Jean Merle.

"It would kill her to know you were here," answered Phebe, looking round her with a terrified glance, as if she expected to see Felicita; "she is not strong, and a sudden agitation and distress might cause her death instantly. No, she must never know. And I am not afraid of Mr. Clifford; he will forgive you with all his heart; and he will be made glad in his old age. I will go down with you this evening. There is a train at four o'clock, and we shall reach Riversborough at eight. Be at the station to meet me."

"You know," said Jean Merle, "that the lapse of years does not free one from trial and conviction? Mr. Clifford can give me into the hands of the police at once; and to-night may see me lodged in Riversborough jail, as if I had been arrested fourteen years ago. You know this, Phebe?"

"Yes, I know it, but I am not afraid of it," she answered.

She had not the slightest fear of old Mr. Clifford's vindictiveness. As she travelled down to Riversborough, with Jean Merle in a third-class carriage of the same train, her mind was very busy with troubled thoughts. There was an unquiet joy stirring in the secret depths of her heart, but she was too full of anxiety and bewilderment to be altogether aware of it. Though it was not more than twenty-four hours since she had known otherwise, it seemed to her as if she had never believed that Roland Sefton was dead, and it appeared incredible that the report of his death should have received such full acceptance as it had everywhere done. Yet though he had come back, there could be no welcome for him. To her and to old Mr. Clifford only could this return from the grave contain any gladness. And was she glad? she asked herself, after a long deliberation over the difficulties surrounding this strange reappearance. She had sorrowed for him and comforted his mother in her mourning, and talked of him as one talks fondly of the dead to his children; and all the sacred healing of time had softened the grief she once felt into a tranquil and grateful memory of him, as of the friend she had loved most, and whose care for her had most widely influenced her life. But she could not own yet that she was glad.

Old Mr. Clifford was sitting in the wainscoted dining-room, his favorite room, when Phebe opened the door silently, and looked in with a pale and anxious face. His sight was dim, and a blaze of light fell upon the dark, old panels, and the old-fashioned silver tankards and bright brass salvers on the carved sideboard. Two or three of Phebe's sunniest pictures hung against the oaken panels. There was a blazing fire on the hearth, and the old man, with his elbows resting on the arms of his chair, and his hands clasped lightly, was watching the play and dance of the flames as they shot up the chimney. Some new books lay on a table beside him, but he was not reading. He was sitting there in utter loneliness, with no companionship except that of his own fading memories. Phebe's tenderness for the old man was very great; and she paused on the threshold gazing at him pitifully; whilst Jean Merle, standing in the hall behind her, caught a glimpse of the hearth so crowded with memories for him, but occupied now by one desolate old man, before the door was closed, and he was left without.

"Why, it's little Phebe Marlowe!" cried Mr. Clifford gladly, looking round at the light sound of a footstep, very different from Mrs. Nixey's heavy tread; "my dear child, you can't tell what a pleasure this is to me."

He had risen up, and stood holding both her hands and looking fondly into her face.

"This moment I was thinking of you, my dear," he said; "I was inditing a long letter to you in my head, which these lazy old fingers of mine would have refused to write. Sandon, the bookseller, has been in here, bringing these books; and he told me a queer story enough. He says that in August last a relation of Madame Sefton's was here, in Riversborough; and told him who he was, in his shop, where he bought one of Felicita's books. Why didn't Sandon come here at once and tell us then, so that you could have found him out, Phebe? You and Felix and Hilda were here. He was a poor man, and seemed badly off; and I guess he came to inquire after Madame. Sandon says he reminded him of Roland—poor Roland! Why, I'd have given the poor fellow a welcome for the sake of that resemblance; and I was just thinking how Phebe's tender heart would have been touched by even so faint a likeness."

"Yes," she murmured.

"And we could have lifted him up a little; quite a poor man, Sandon says," continued Mr. Clifford; "but sit down, my dear. There is no one in the wide world would be so welcome to me as little Phebe Marlowe, who refused to be my adopted daughter."

He had drawn a chair close beside his own, for he would not loose her hand, but kept it closely grasped by his thin and crooked fingers.

"You have altogether forgiven Roland?" she said tremulously.

"Altogether, my dear," he answered.

"As Christ forgives us, bearing away our sins Himself?" she said.

"As Christ forgave us," he replied, bowing his head solemnly.

"And if it was possible—think it possible," she went on, "that he could come back again, that the grave in Engelberg could give up its dead, he would be welcome to you?"

"If my old friend Sefton's son, could come back again," he said, "he would be more welcome to me than you are, Phebe. How often do I fancy him sitting yonder in Sefton's chair, watching me with his dear eyes!"

"But suppose he had deceived us all," she continued, "if he had escaped from your anger by another fraud; a worse fraud! If he had managed so as to bury some one else in his name, and go on living under a false one! Could you forgive that?"

"If Roland could come back a repentant man, I would forgive him every sin," answered Mr. Clifford, "and rejoice that I had not driven him to seek death. But what do you mean, Phebe? why do you ask?"

"Because," she answered, speaking almost in a whisper, with her face close to his, "Roland did not die. That man, who was here in August, and called himself Jean Merle, is Roland himself. He saw you, and all of us, and did not dare to make himself known. I can tell you all about it. But, oh! he has bitterly repented; and there is no place of repentance for him in this world. He cannot come back amongst us, and be Roland Sefton again."

"Where is he?" asked the old man, trembling.

"He is here; he came with me. I will go and fetch him," she answered.

Mr. Clifford leaned back in his arm-chair, and gazed towards the half-open door. His memory had gone back twenty years, to the last time he had seen Roland Sefton, in the prime of his youth, handsome, erect, and happy, who had made his heart ache as he thought of his own abandoned son, lying buried in a common grave in Paris. The man whom he saw entering slowly and reluctantly into the room behind Phebe, was gray-headed, bent, and abject. This man paused just within the doorway, looking not at him but round the room, with a glance full of grief and remembrance. The eager, questioning eyes of old Mr. Clifford did not arrest his attention, or divert it from the aspect of the old familiar place.

"No, no, Phebe!" exclaimed Mr. Clifford, "he's an impostor, my dear. That's not my old friend's son Roland."

"Would to God I were not!" cried Jean Merle bitterly, "would to God I stood in this room as a stranger! Phebe Marlowe, this is very hard; my punishment is greater than I can bear. All my life comes back to me here. This place, of all other places in the world, brings my sin and folly to remembrance."

He sank down on a chair, and buried his face in his hands, to shut out the hateful sight of the old home. He was inside his Paradise again; and behold, it was a place of torment. There was no room in his thoughts for Mr. Clifford, it was nothing to him that he should be called an impostor. He came to claim nothing, not even his own name. But the avenging memories of the past claimed him and held him fast bound. Even last night, when in the chill darkness of the November night he had watched the house which held Felicita and their children, his pain had been less poignant than now, within these walls, where all his happy life had been passed. He was unconscious of everything but his pain. He could not hear Phebe's voice speaking for him to Mr. Clifford. He saw and felt nothing, until a gentle and trembling hand pressing on his shoulder feebly and as tenderly as his mother's made him look up into the gray and agitated face of Mr. Clifford bending over him.

"Roland! Roland!" he said, in a voice broken by sobs, "my old friend's son, forgive me as I forgive you. God be thanked, you have come back again in time for me to see you and bid you welcome. I bless God with all my heart. It is your own home, Roland, your own home."

With his feeble but eager old hands he drew him to the hearth, and placed him in the chair close beside his own, where Phebe had been sitting, and kept his hand upon his arm, lest he should vanish out of his sight.

"You shall tell me nothing more to-night," he said; "I am old, and this is enough for me. It is enough that to-night you and I have pardoned one another from 'the low depths of our hearts.' Tell me nothing else to-night."

Phebe had slipped away from them to help Mrs. Nixey to prepare a room for Jean Merle. It was the one that had been Roland Sefton's nursery, and the nursery of his children, and it was still occupied by Felix, when he visited his old home. The homely hospitable occupation was a relief to her; but in the room that she had left the two men sat side by side in unbroken silence.



CHAPTER XX.

AS A HIRED SERVANT.

From a profound and dreamless sleep Jean Merle awoke early the next morning, with the blessed feeling of being at home again in his father's house. The heavy cross-beams of black oak dividing the ceiling into panels; the low broad lattice window with a few upper panes of old stained glass; the faded familiar pictures on the wall; these all awoke in him memories of his earliest years. In the corner of the room, hardly to be distinguished from the wainscot, was the high narrow door communicating with his mother's chamber, through which he had often, how often! seen her come in softly, on tiptoe, to take a look at him. His own children, too, had slept there; and it was here that he had last seen his little son and daughter before fleeing from his home a self-accused criminal. All the happy, prosperous life of Roland Sefton had been encompassed round by these walls.

But the dead past must bury the dead. If there had ever been a deep, buried, hidden hope, that a possible return to something of the old life lay in the unknown future, it was now utterly uprooted. Such a return was only possible over the ruined lives and broken hearts of Felicita and his children. If he made himself known, though he was secure against prosecution, the story of his former crime would revive, and spread wider, joined with the fair name of Felicita, than it would have done when he was merely a fraudulent banker in a country town. However true it might be what Phebe maintained, that he might have suffered the penalty of his sin, and afterwards retrieved the past, whilst his children were too young to feel the full bitterness of the shame, it was too late to do it now. The name he had dishonored was forever forfeited. His return to his former life was hedged up on every hand.

But a new courage was awaking in him, which helped him to grapple with his despair. He would bury the dead past, and go on into the future making the best of his life, maimed and marred as it was by his own folly. He was still in the prime of his age, thirty years younger than Mr. Clifford, whose intellect was as keen and clear as ever; there was a long span of time stretching before him, to be used or misused.

"Come unto Me all ye that be weary, and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He seemed to see the words in the quaint upright characters in which old Marlowe had carved them under the crucifix. He had fancied he knew what coming to Christ meant in those old days of his, when he was reputed a religious man, and was first and foremost in all religious and philanthropic schemes, making his trespass more terrible and pernicious than if it had been the transgression of a worldly man. But it was not so when he came to Christ this morning. He was a broken-hearted man, who had cut himself off from all human ties and affections, and who was longing to feel that he was not forsaken of the universal Brother and Saviour. His cry was, "My soul thirsteth for thee; my flesh longeth for thee, in a dry and weary land, where no water is." It was his own fault that he was in the dry and weary wilderness; but oh! if Christ would not forsake him then, would dwell with him, even in this desert made desolate by himself, then at last he might find peace to his soul.

There was a deep inner consciousness, the forgotten but not obliterated faith of his boyhood and youth, before the world with its pomps and ambitions had laid its iron hand upon him, that Christ was with him, leading him day by day, if he would but follow nearer to God. Was it impossible to follow His guidance now? Could he not, even yet, take up his cross, and be willing to fill any place which he could yet fill worthily and humbly; expiating his sins against his fellow-men by truer devotion to their service, as Jean Merle, the working-man; not as Roland Sefton, the prosperous and fraudulent banker?

This return to his father's house, and all its associations, solemn and sacred with a peculiar sacredness and solemnity, seemed to him a pledge that he could once more be admitted into the great brotherhood and home of Christ's disciples. Every object on which his eye rested smote him, but it was with the stroke of a friend. A clear and sweet light from the past shed its penetrating rays into the darkest corners of his soul. Forgiven! God had forgiven him; and man had forgiven him. Before him lay an obscure and humble path; but the heaviest part of his burden was gone. He must go heavy-laden to the end of his days, treading in rough paths; but despair had fled, and with it the sense of being separated from God and man.

He heard the feeble yet deep old voice of Mr. Clifford outside his door inquiring from Mrs. Nixey if Mr. Merle was gone down-stairs yet. He made haste to go down, treading the old staircase with something of the alacrity of former days. Phebe was in the dining-room, and the servants came in to prayer as they had been used to do forty years ago when he was a child. An old-world tranquillity and peacefulness was in the familiar scene which breathed a deep calm over his tempest-tossed spirit.

"Phebe has been telling me all," said Mr. Clifford, when breakfast was over; "tell me what can be done to save Felicita and the children."

"I am Jean Merle," he answered with a melancholy smile, "Jean Merle, and no one else. I come back with no claims, and they must never know me. Why should I cross their path and blight it? I cannot atone for the past in any way, except by keeping away forever from them. I shall injure no one by continuing to be Jean Merle."

"No," said Phebe, "it is too late now, and it would kill Felicita."

"This morning a thought struck me," he continued, "a project for my future life, which you can help me to put into execution, Phebe. I have an intolerable dread of losing sight of you all again; let me be at least somewhere in England, when you can now and then give me tidings of my children and Felicita."

"I will do anything in the world to help you," cried Phebe eagerly.

"Then let me go to your little farm," he answered, "and take up your father's life, at least for a time, until I can see how to make myself of greater use to my fellow-men. I will till the fields as he did, and finish the carvings he has left undone, and live his simple, silent life. It will be good for me, and I shall not be banished from my own country. I shall be a happier man then than I have any right to be."

"Have you no fear of being recognized?" she asked.

"None," he replied. "Look at me, Phebe. Should you have known me again if I had not betrayed myself to you?"

"I should have known you again anywhere," she exclaimed. But it was her heart that cried out that no change could have concealed him from her; there was a dread lying deep down in her conscience that she might have passed him by with no suspicion. He shook his head in answer to her assertion.

"I will go out into the town," he continued, "and speak to half-a-dozen men who knew me best, and there will be no gleam of recognition in their eyes. Recollect Roland Sefton is dead, and has been dead so long that there will be no clear memory left of him as he was then to compare with me. And any dim resemblance to him will be fully accounted for by my relationship to Madame Sefton. No, I am not afraid of the keenest eyes."

He went out as he had said, and met his old townsmen, many of whom were themselves so changed that he could barely recognize them. The memory of Roland Sefton was blotted out, he was utterly forgotten as a dead man out of mind.

As Jean Merle strayed through the streets crowded with market-people come in from the country, his new scheme grew stronger and brighter to him. It would keep him in England, within reach of all he had loved and had lost. The little place was dear to him, and the laborious, secluded peasant life had a charm for him who had so long lived as a Swiss peasant. By-and-by, he thought, the chance resemblance in the names would merge that of Merle into the more familiar name of Marlowe; and the identity of his pursuits with those of the deaf and dumb old man would hasten such a change. So the years to come would pass by in labor and obscurity; and an obscure grave in the little churchyard, where all the Marlowes lay, would shelter him at last. A quiet haven after many storms; but oh! what a shipwreck had he made of his life!

All the morning Mr. Clifford sat in his arm-chair lost in thought, only looking up sometimes to ply Phebe with questions. When Jean Merle returned, his gray, meditative face grew bright, with a faint smile shining through his dim eyes.

"You are no phantom then!" he said. "I've been so used to your company as a ghost that when you are out of sight I fancy myself dreaming. I could not let Phebe go away lest I should feel that all this is not real. Did any one know you again?"

"Not a soul," he answered; "how could they? Mrs. Nixey herself has no remembrance of me. There is no fear of my being known."

"Then I want you to stay with me," said old Mr. Clifford eagerly; "I'm a lonely man, seventy-seven years old, with neither kith nor kin, and it seems a long and dreary road to the grave. I want one to sit beside me in these long evenings, and to take care of me as a son takes care of his old father. Could you do it, Jean Merle? I beseech you, if it is possible, give me your services in my old age."

"It will be hard for you," pleaded Phebe in a low voice, "harder than going out alone to my little home. But you would do more good here; you could save us from anxiety, for we are often very anxious and sorrowful about Mr. Clifford. I can take care that you should always know before Felix and Hilda come down. Felicita never comes."

How much harder it would be for him even Phebe could not guess. To dwell within reach of his old home was altogether different from living in it, with its countless memories, and the unremitting stings of conscience. To have about him all that he had lost and made desolate; the empty home, from which all the familiar faces and beloved voices had vanished; this lot surely was harder than the humble, laborious life of old Marlowe on the hills. Yet if any one living had a claim upon him for such self-sacrifice, it was this feeble, tottering old man, who was gazing up into his face with urgent and imploring eyes.

"I will stay here and be your servant," he answered, "if there appears no reason against it when we have given it more thought."



CHAPTER XXI.

PHEBE'S SECRET.

For the first time in her life those who were about Phebe Marlowe felt that she was under a cloud. The sweet sunny atmosphere, as of a clear and peaceful day, which seemed to surround her, had fled. She was absent and depressed, and avoided society, even that of Hilda, who had been like her own child to her. Towards Felicita there was a subtle change in Phebe's manner, which could not fail to impress deeply her sensitive temperament. She felt that Phebe shrank from her, and that she was no longer welcome to the studio, which of all places in the world had been to her a place of repose, and of brief cessation of troubled thought. Phebe's direct and simple nature, free from all guile and worldliness, had made her a perfect sympathizer with any true feeling. And Felicita's feeling with regard to her past most sorrowful life had been absolutely real; if only Phebe had known all the circumstances of it as she had always supposed she did.

Phebe was, moreover, fearful of some accident betraying to Felicita the circumstance of Jean Merle living at Riversborough. There had never been any direct correspondence between Felicita and Mr. Clifford, except on purely business matters; and Felix was too much engrossed with his own affairs to find time to run down to Riversborough, or to keep up an animated interchange of letters with his old friend there. The intercourse between them had been chiefly carried on through Phebe herself, who was the old man's prime favorite. Neither was he a man likely to let out anything he might wish to conceal. But still she was nervous and afraid. How far from improbable it was that through some unthought-of channel Felicita might hear that a stranger, related to Madame Sefton, had entered the household of Mr. Clifford as his confidential attendant, and that this stranger's name was Jean Merle. What would happen then?

She was burdened with a secret, and her nature abhorred a secret. There was gladness, almost utterly pure, to her in the belief that there was One being who could read the inmost recesses of her heart, and see, with the loving-kindness of an Allwise Father, its secret faults, the errors which she did not herself understand. That she had nothing to tell to God, which He did not know of her already, was one of the deepest foundations of her spiritual life. And in some measure, in all possible measure, she would have had it so with those whom she loved. She did not shrink from showing to them her thoughts, and motives, and emotions. It was the limit of expression, so quickly reached, so impassable, that chafed her; and she was always searching for fresh modes of conveying her own feeling to other souls. Possibly the enforced speechlessness in which she had passed her early years had aided in creating this passionate desire to impart herself to those about her in unfettered communion, and she ardently delighted in the same unreserved confidence in those who conversed with her. But now she was doomed to bear the burden of a secret fraught with strange and painful consequences to those whom she loved, if time should ever divulge it.

The winter months passed away cheerlessly, though she worked with more persistent energy than ever before, partly to drive away the thoughts that troubled her. She heard from Mr. Clifford, but not more frequently than usual, and Jean Merle did not venture upon sending her a line of his hand-writing. Mr. Clifford spoke in guarded terms of the comfort he found in the companionship of his attendant, in spite of his being a sad and moody man. Now and then he told Phebe that this attendant of his had gone for a day or two to her solitary little house on the uplands, of which Mr. Clifford kept the key, and that he stayed there a day or two, finishing the half-carved blocks of oak her father had left incomplete. It would have been a happier existence, she knew, for himself, if Jean Merle had gone to dwell there altogether; but it was along this path of self-sacrifice and devotion alone lay the road back to a Christian life.

One point troubled Phebe's conscience more than any other. Ought she not at least to tell Canon Pascal what she knew? She could not help feeling that this second fraud would seem worse in his estimation than the first one. And Felicita, the very soul of truth and honor, had connived at it! It seemed immeasurably more terrible in Phebe's own eyes. To her money had so small a value, it lay on so low a level in the scale of life, that a crime in connection with it had far less guilt than one against the affections. And how unutterable a sin against all who loved him had Roland and Felicita fallen into! She recalled his mother's mourning for him through many long years, and her belief in death that she was going soon to rejoin the beloved son whom she had lost. Her own grief she put aside, but there was the deep, boyish sorrow of Felix, and even little Hilda's fatherlessness, as the children had grown up through the various stages of childhood. It might have been bad for them to bear the stigma of their father's shame, but still Phebe believed it would have been better for every one of them to have gone bravely forward to bear the just consequences of sin.

She went down into Essex to spend a day or two at Christmas, carrying with her the fitful spirit so foreign to her. The perfect health that had been hers hitherto was broken; and Mrs. Pascal, a confirmed invalid, to whom Phebe's physical vigor and evenness of temper had been a constant source of delight and invigoration, felt the change in her keenly.

"She has something on her mind," she said to her husband; "you must try and find it out, or she will be ill."

"I know she has a secret," he answered, "but it is not her own. Phebe Marlowe is as open as the day; she will never have a secret of her own."

But he made no effort to find out her secret. His searching, kindly eyes met hers with the trustfulness of a frank and open nature that recognized a nature akin to its own, and Phebe never shrank from his gaze, though her lips remained closed. If it was right for her to tell him anything of the stranger who had been about to make him his confessor, she would do it. Canon Pascal would not ask any questions.

"Felix and Alice are growing more and more deeply in love with each other," he said to her; "there is something beautiful and pleasant in being a spectator of these palmy days of theirs. Felicita even felt something of their happiness when she was here last, and she will not withhold her full approbation much longer."

"And you," answered Phebe, with an eager flush on her face, "you do not repent of giving Alice to the son of a man who might have been a convict?"

"I believe Alice would marry Felix if his father had been a murderer," replied Canon Pascal; "it is too late to alter it now. Besides, I know Felix through and through, he is himself; he is no longer the son of any person, but a true man, one of the sons of God."

The strong and emphatic tone of Canon Pascal's words brought great consolation to Phebe's troubled mind. She might keep silence with a good conscience, for the duty of disclosing all to Canon Pascal arose simply from the possibility that his conduct would be altered by this further knowledge of Roland and Felicita.

"But this easy country life is not good for Felix," she said in a more cheerful tone; "he needs a difficult parish to develop his energies. It is not among your people he will become a second Felix Merle."

"Patience! Phebe," he answered, "there is a probability in the future, a bare probability, and dimly distant, which may change all that. He may have as much to do as Felix Merle by and by."

Phebe returned to her work in London with a somewhat lighter heart. Yet the work was painful to her; work which a few months before would have been a delight. For Felicita, yielding to the urgent entreaties of Felix and Hilda, had consented to sit for her portrait. She was engaged in no writing, and had ample leisure. Until now she had resisted all importunity, and no likeness of her existed. She disliked photographs, and had only had one taken for Roland alone when they were married, and she could never bring herself to sit for an artist comparatively a stranger to her. It was opposed to her reserved and somewhat haughty temperament that any eye should scan too freely and too curiously the lineaments of her beautiful face, with its singularly expressive individuality. But now that Phebe's skill had been so highly cultivated, and commanded an increasing reputation, she could no longer oppose her children's reiterated entreaties.

Felicita was groping blindly for the reason of the change in Phebe's feeling towards her, for she was conscious of some vague, mysterious barrier that had arisen between her and the tender, simple soul which had been always full of lowly sympathy for her. But Phebe silently shrank from her in a terror mingled with profound, unutterable pity. For here was a secret misery of a solitary human spirit, ice-bound in a self-chosen isolation, which was an utter mystery to her. All the old love and reverence, amounting almost to adoration, which she had, offered up as incense to some being far above her had died away; gone also was the child-like simplicity with which she could always talk to Felicita. She could read the pride and sadness of the lovely face before her with a clear understanding now, but the lines which reproduced it on her canvas were harder and sterner than they would have been if she had known less of Felicita's heart. The painting grew into a likeness, but it was a painful one, full of hidden sadness, bitterness, and infelicity. Felix and Hilda gazed at it in silence, almost as solemn and mournful as if they were looking on the face of their dead mother. She herself turned from it with a feeling of dread.

"How much do you know of me?" she cried; "how deep can you look into my heart, Phebe?" Phebe glanced from her to the finished portrait, and only answered by tears.



CHAPTER XXII.

NEAR THE END.

Felicita had followed the urgent advice of her physicians in giving up writing for a season. There was no longer any necessity for her work, as some time since the money which Roland Sefton had fraudulently appropriated, had been paid back with full interest, and she began to feel justified in accepting the income from her marriage settlement. During the winter and spring she spent her days much as other women of her class and station, in a monotonous round of shopping, driving in the parks, visiting, and being visited, partly for Hilda's sake, and partly driven to it for want of occupation; but short as the time was which she gave to this life, she grew inexpressibly weary of it. Early, in May she turned into Phebe's studio, which she had seldom entered since her portrait was finished. This portrait was in the Academy Exhibition, and she was constantly receiving empty compliments about it.

"Dear Phebe!" she exclaimed, "I have tried fashionable life to see how much it is worth, and oh! it is altogether hollow and inane. I did not expect much from it, but it is utter weariness to me."

"And you will go back to your writing?" said Phebe.

Felicita hesitated for a moment. There was a worn and harassed expression on her pale face, as if she had not slept or rested well for a long time, which touched Phebe's heart.

"Not yet," she answered; "I am going on a journey. I shall start for Switzerland to-night."

"To Switzerland! To-night!" echoed Phebe. "Oh, no! you must not, you cannot. And alone? How can you think of going alone?"

"I went alone once," she answered, smiling with her lips, though her dark eyes grew no brighter, "and I can go again. I shall manage very well. I fancied you would not care to go with me," she added, sighing.

"But I must go with you!" cried Phebe; "did I not promise long ago? Only don't go to-night, stay a day or two."

"No, no," she said with feverish impatience, "I have made all my arrangements. Nobody must know, and Hilda is gone down into Essex for a week, and my cousins fancy I am going to the sea-side for a few days' rest. I must start to-night, in less than four hours, Phebe. You cannot be ready in time?"

But she spoke wistfully, as if it would be pleasant to hear Phebe say she would go with her. For a few minutes Phebe was lost in bewildered thought. Felicita had told her some months ago that she must go to Engelberg before she could give her consent to Felix marrying Alice, but it had escaped her memory, pushed out by more immediate and more present cares. And now she could not tell what Jean Merle would have her do. To discover suddenly that he was alive, and in England, nay, at Riversborough itself, under their old roof, would be too great a shock for Felicita. Phebe dared not tell her. Yet, to let her start off alone on this fruitless errand, to find only an empty hut at Engelberg, with no trace of its occupant left behind, was heartless, and might prove equally injurious to Felicita. There was no time to communicate with Riversborough, she must come to a decision for herself, and at once. The white, worn face, with its air of sad determination, filled her with deep and eager pity.

"Oh! I will go with you," she cried. "I could never bear you to go alone. But is there nothing you can tell me? Only trust me. What trouble carries you there? Why must you go to Engelberg before Felix marries?"

She had caught Felicita's small cold hand between her own and looked up beseechingly into her face. Oh! if she would but now, at last, throw off the burden which had so long bowed her down, and tell her secret, she could let her know that this painful pilgrimage was utterly needless. But the sweet, sad, proud lips were closed, and the dark eyes looking down steadily into Phebe's, betrayed no wavering of her determined reticence.

"You shall come with me as far as Lucerne, dear Phebe," she answered, stooping down to kiss her uplifted face, "but I must go alone to Engelberg."

There was barely time enough for Phebe to make any arrangements, there was not a moment for deliberation. She wrote a few hurried words to Jean Merle, imploring him to follow them at once, and promising to detain Felicita on their way, if possible. Felicita's own preparations were complete, and her route marked out, with the time of steamers and trains set down. Through Paris, Mulhausen, and Basle she hastened on to Lucerne. Now she had set out on this dreary and dolorous path there could be no rest for her until she reached the end. Phebe recognized this as soon as they had started. It would be impossible to detain Felicita on the way.

But Jean Merle could not be far behind them, a few hours would bring him to them after they had reached Lucerne. Felicita was very silent as they travelled on by the swiftest trains, and Phebe was glad of it. For what could she say to her? She was herself lost in a whirl of bewilderment, and of mingled hope and fear. Could it possibly be that Felicita would learn that Jean Merle was still living, and the mode and manner of his life through this long separation, and yet stand aloof from him, afar off, as one on whom he had no claim, claim for pity and love? But if she could relent towards him, how must it be in the future? It could never be that she would own the wrong she had committed openly in the face of the world. What was to happen now? Phebe was hardly less feverishly agitated than Felicita herself.

It was evening when they arrived at Lucerne, and Felicita was forced to rest until the morning. They sat together in a small balcony opening out of her chamber, which overlooked the Lake, where the moonbeams were playing in glistening curves over the quiet ripples of the water. All the mountains round it looked black in the dim light, and the rugged summit of Pilatus, still slightly sprinkled with snow, frowned down upon them; but southward, behind the dark range of lower hills, there stood out against the almost black-blue of the sky a broken line of pale, mysterious peaks, which might have been merely pallid clouds lying along the horizon but for their stedfast, unaltering immobility. They were the Engelberg Alps, with the snowy Titlis gleaming highest among them; and Felicita's face, wan and pallid as themselves, was set towards them.

"You will let me come with you to-morrow?" said Phebe, in a tone of painful entreaty.

"No, no," she answered. "I could not bear to have even you at Engelberg with me. I must visit that grave alone. And yet I know you love me, dear Phebe."

"Dearly!" she sobbed.

"Yes, you love me dearly," she repeated sorrowfully, "but not as you once did; even your heart is changed towards me. If you went with me to-morrow I might lose all the love that is left. I cannot afford to lose that, my dear."

"You could never lose it!" answered Phebe. "I love you differently? Yes, but not less. I love you now as Christ loves us all, more for God's sake than our own; and that is the deepest, most faithful love. That can never be worn out or repulsed. As Christ has loved me, so I love you, my Felicita."

Her voice had fallen into an almost inaudible whisper, as she knelt down beside her, pressing her lips upon the thin, cold hands lying listlessly on Felicita's lap. It had been as an impulsive girl, worshipping her from a lowly inferiority, that Phebe had been used long ago to kiss Felicita's hand. But this was the humility of a great love, willing to help, and seeking to save her. Felicita felt it through every fibre of her sensitive nature. For an instant she thought it might be possible that Phebe had caught some glimmer of the truth. With her weary and dim eyes lifted up to the pale crests of the mountains, beneath which lay the miserable secret of her life, she hesitated as to whether she could tell Phebe all. But the effort to admit any human soul into the inner recesses of her own was too great for her.

"Christ loves me, you say," she murmured, "I don't know; I never felt it. But I have felt sure of your love; and next to Felix and Hilda you have stood nearest to me. Love me always, and in spite of all, my dear."

She lifted up her bowed head and kissed her lips with a long and lingering kiss. Then Phebe knew that she was bent upon going alone and immediately to Engelberg.

* * * * *

The icy air of the morning, blowing down from the mountains where the winter's snow was but partially melted, made Felicita shiver, though her mind was too busy to notice why. Phebe had seen that she was warmly clad, and had come down to the boat with her to start her on this last day's journey; but Felicita had scarcely opened her pale lips to say good-by. She stood on the quay, watching the boat as long as the white steam from the funnel was in sight, and then she turned away, blind to all the scenery about her, in the heaviness of heart she felt for the sorrowful soul going out on so sad and vain a quest. There had been no time for Jean Merle to overtake them, and now Felicita was gone when a few words from her would have stopped her. But Phebe had not dared to utter them.

Felicita too had not seen either the sunlit hills lying about her, or Phebe watching her departure. She had no thought for anything but what there might be lying before her, in that lonely mountain village, to which, after fourteen years, her reluctant feet were turned. Possibly she might find no trace of the man who had been so long dead to her and to all the world, and thus be baffled and defeated, yet relieved, at the first stage of her search. For she did not desire to find him. Her heart would be lightened of its miserable load, if she should discover that Jean Merle was dead, and buried in the same quiet cemetery where the granite cross marked the grave of Roland Sefton. That was a thing to be hoped for. If Jean Merle was living still, and living there, what should she say to him? Wild hopes and desires would be awakened within him if he found her seeking after him? Nay, it might possibly be that he would insist upon making their mutual sin known to the world, by claiming to return to her and her children. It seemed a desperate thing to have done; and for the first time since she left London she repented of having done it. Was she not sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind? There was still time for her to retrace her steps and go back home, the home she owed altogether to herself; yet one which this man, whom she had not seen for so long a time, had a right to enter as the master of it. What fatal impulse had driven her to leave it on so wild and fruitless an errand?

Yet she felt she could no longer live without knowing the fate of Jean Merle. Her heart had been gnawing itself ever since they parted with vague remorses and self-accusations, slumbering often, but now aroused into an activity that could not be laid to rest. This morning, for the first time, beneath all her perplexity and fear and hope to find him dead, there came to her a strange, undefined, scarcely conscious tenderness towards the miserable man, whom she had last seen standing in her presence, an uncouth, ragged, weather-beaten peasant. The man had been her husband, the father of her children, and a deep, keen pain was stirring in her soul, partly of the old love, for she had once loved him, and partly of the pity she felt for him, as she began to realize the difference there had existed between her lot and his.

She scarcely felt how worn out she was, how dangerously fatigued with this rapid travelling and the resistless current of agitation which had possessed her. As she journeyed onwards she was altogether unconscious of the roads she traversed, only arousing herself when any change of conveyance made it necessary. Her brain was busy over the opinion, more than once expressed by Phebe, that every man could live down the evil consequences of his sin, if he had courage and faith enough. "If God forgives us, man will forgive us," said Phebe. But Felicita pondered over the possibility of Roland having paid the penalty of his crime, and going back again to take up his life, walking more humbly in it evermore, with no claim to preeminence save that of most diligently serving his fellow-men. She endeavored to picture herself receiving him back again from the convict prison, with all its shameful memories branded on him, and looking upon him again as her husband and the father of her children; and she found herself crying out to her own heart that it would have been impossible to her. Phebe might have done it, but she—never!

The journey, though not more than fourteen miles from Stans to Engelberg, occupied several hours, so broken up the narrow road was by the winter's rains and the melting snow. The steep ascent between Grafenort and Engelberg was dangerous, the more so as a heavy thunderstorm broke over it; but Felicita remained insensible to any peril. At length the long, narrow valley lay before her, stretching upwards to the feet of the rocky hills. The thunderstorm that had met them on the road had been raging fiercely in this mountain caldron, and was but just passing away in long, low mutterings, echoed and prolonged amid the precipitous walls of rock. Tall, trailing, spectre-like clouds slowly followed each other in solemn and stately procession up the valley, as though amid their light yet impenetrable folds of vapor they bore the invisible form of some mysterious being; whether in triumph or in sorrow it was impossible to tell. The sun caught their gray crests and tinged them with rainbow colors; and as they floated unhastingly along, the valley behind them seemed to spring into a new life of sunshine and mirth.



CHAPTER XXIII.

THE MOST MISERABLE.

It was past noon when Felicita was driven up to the hotel in the village, where, when she had last been at Engelberg, she had gone to look upon the dead face of the stranger, who was to carry away the sin of Roland Sefton, with the shame it would bring upon her, and bury it forever in his grave. It seemed but a few days ago, and she felt reluctant to enter the house again. In two or three hours when the horses were rested, she said to the driver, she would be ready to return to Stans. Then she wandered out into the village street, thinking she might come across some peasant at work alone, or some woman standing idly at her door, with whom she could fall into a casual conversation, and learn what she had come to ascertain. But she met with no solitary villager; and she strayed onward, almost unwittingly in the direction of the cemetery. In passing by the church, she pushed open one of the heavy, swinging doors, and cast a glance around; there was no one in sight, but the gabble of boys' voices in some vestry close by reached her ear, and a laugh rang after it, which echoed noisily in the quiet aisles. The high altar was lit up by a light from a side-window and her eye was arrested by it. Still, whether she saw and heard, or was deaf and blind, she scarcely knew. Her feet were drawn by some irresistible attraction towards the grave where her husband was not buried.

She did not know in what corner of the graveyard it was to be found; and when she entered the small enclosure, with its wooden cross at the head of every narrow mound, she stood still for a minute or two, hesitatingly, and looking before her with a bewildered and reluctant air, as if engaged in an enterprise she recoiled from. A young priest, the cure of the nearest mountain parish, who visiting the grave of one of his parishioners lately buried at Engelberg, was passing to and fro among the grassy mounds with his breviary in his hands, and his lips moving as if in prayer; but at the unexpected sight of a traveller thus early in the season, his curiosity was aroused, and he bent his steps towards her. When he was sufficiently near to catch her wandering eye, he spoke in a quiet and courteous manner—

"Is madame seeking for any special spot?" he inquired.

"Yes," answered Felicita, fastening upon him her large; sad eyes, which had dark rings below them, intensifying the mournfulness of their expression, "I am looking for a grave. The grave of a stranger; Roland Sefton. I have come from England to find it."

Her voice was constrained and low; and the words came in brief, panting syllables, which sounded almost like sobs. The black-robed priest looked closely and scrutinizingly into the pallid face turned towards him, which was as rigid as marble, except for the gleam of the dark eyes.

"Madame is suffering; she is ill!" he said.

"No, not ill," answered Felicita, in an absent manner, as if she was speaking in a dream, "but of all women the most miserable."

It seemed to the young cure that the English lady was not aware of what words she uttered. He felt embarrassed and perplexed: all the English were heretics, and how heretics could be comforted or counselled he did not know. But the dreamy sadness of her face appealed to his compassion. The only thing he could do for her was to guide her to the grave she was seeking.

For the last nine months no hand had cleared away the weeds from around it, or the moss from gathering upon it. The little pathway trodden by Jean Merle's feet was overgrown, though still perceptible, and the priest walked along it, with Felicita following him. Little threads of grass were filling up the deep clear-cut lettering on the cross; and the gray and yellow lichens were creeping over the granite. Since the snow had melted and the sun had shone hotly into the high-lying valley there had been a rapid growth of vegetation here, as everywhere else, and the weeds and grass had flourished luxuriantly; but amongst them Alice's slip of ivy had thrown out new buds and tendrils. The priest paused before the grave, with Felicita standing beside him silent and spell-bound. She did not weep or cry, or fling herself upon the ground beside it, as he had expected. When he looked askance at her marble face there was no trace of emotion upon it, excepting that her lips moved very slightly, as if they formed the words inscribed upon the cross.

"It is not in good order just at present," he said, breaking the oppressive silence; "the peasant who took charge of it, Jean Merle, disappeared from Engelberg last summer, and has never since been seen or heard of. They say he was paid to take care of this grave; and truly when he was here there was no weed, no soil, no little speck of moss upon it. There was no other grave kept like this. Was Roland Sefton a relation of Madame?"

"Yes," she whispered, or he thought she whispered it from the motion of her lips.

"Madame is not a Catholic?" he asked.

Felicita shook her head.

"What a pity! what a pity!" he continued, in a tone of mild regret, "or I could console her. Yet I will pray for her this night to the good God, and the Mother of Sorrows, to give her comfort. If she only knew the solace of opening her heart; even to a fellow-mortal!"

"Does no one know where Jean Merle is?" she asked, in a low but clear penetrating voice, which startled him, he said afterwards, almost as much as if the image of the blessed Virgin had spoken to him. With the effort to speak, a slight color flushed across the pale wan face, and her eyes fastened eagerly upon him.

"No one, Madame," he replied; "the poor man was a misanthrope, and lived quite alone, in misery. He came neither to confession nor to mass; but whether he was a heretic or an atheist no man knew. Where he came from or where he went to was known only to himself. But they think that he must have perished on the mountains, for he disappeared suddenly last August. His little hut is falling into ruins; it was too poor a place for anybody but him."

"I must go there; where is it?" she inquired, turning abruptly away from the grave, without a tear or a prayer, he observed. The spell that had bound her seemed broken; and she looked agitated and hurried. There was more vigor and decision in her face and manner than he could have believed possible a few moments before. She was no longer a marble image of despair.

"If Madame will go quite through the village," he answered, "it is the last house on the way to Stans. But it cannot be called a house; it is a ruin. It stands apart from all the rest, like an accursed spot; for no person will go near it. If Madame goes, she will find no one there."

With a quick yet stately gesture of farewell, Felicita turned away, and walked swiftly down the little path, not running, but moving so rapidly that she was soon out of sight. By and by, when he had had time to think over the interview and to recover from his surprise, he followed her, but he saw nothing of her; only the miserable hovel where poor Jean Merle had lived, into which she had probably found an entrance.

Felicita had learned something of what she had come to discover. Jean Merle had been living in Engelberg until the last summer, though now he had disappeared. Perished on the mountains! oh! could that be true? It was likely to be true. He had always been a daring mountaineer when there was every motive to make him careful of his life; and now what could make it precious to him? There was no other reason for suddenly breaking off the thread of his life here in Engelberg; for Felicita had never imagined it possible that he would return to England. If he had disappeared he must have perished on the mountains.

Yet there was no relief to her in the thought. If she had heard in England that he was dead there would have been a sense of deliverance, and a secret consciousness of real freedom, which would have made her future course lie before her in brighter and more tranquil light. She would at least be what she seemed to be. But here, amid the scenes of his past life, there was a deep compunction in her heart, and a profound pity for the miserable man, whose neighbors knew nothing about him but that he had disappeared out of their sight. That she should come to seek him, and find not even his grave, oppressed her with anguish as she passed along the village street, till she saw the deserted hut standing apart like an accursed place, the fit dwelling of an outcast.

The short ladder that led to it was half broken, but she could climb it easily; and the upper part of the door was partly open, and swinging lazily to and fro in the light breeze that was astir after the storm. There was no difficulty in unfastening the bolt which held the lower half; and Felicita stepped into the low room. She stood for awhile, how long she did not know, gazing forward with wide open motionless eyes, the brain scarcely conscious of seeing through them, though the sight before her was reflected on their dark and glistening surface. A corner of the roof had fallen in during the winter, and a stream of bright light shone through it, irradiating the dim and desolate interior. The abject poverty of her husband's dwelling-place was set in broad daylight. The windowless walls, the bare black rafters overhead, the rude bed of juniper branches and ferns, the log-seat, rough as it had come out of the forest—she saw them all as if she saw them not, so busy was her brain that it could take no notice of them just now.

So busy was it that all her life seemed to be hurrying and crowding and whirling through it, with swift pictures starting into momentary distinctness and dying suddenly to give place to others. It was a terrifying and enthralling phantasmagoria which held her spell-bound on the threshold of this ruined hovel, her husband's last shelter.

At last she roused herself, and stepped forward hesitatingly. Her eyes had fallen upon a book or two at the end of a shelf as black as the walls; and books had always called to her with a voice that could not be resisted. She crept slowly and feebly across the mouldering planks of the floor, through which she could see the grass springing on the turf below the hut. But when she lifted up the mildewed and dust-covered volume lying uppermost and opened it, her eyes fell first upon her own portrait, stained, faded, nearly blotted out; yet herself as she was when she became Roland Sefton's wife.

She sank down, faint and trembling, on the rough block of wood, and leaned back against the mouldy walls, with the photograph in her hand, and her eyes fastened upon it. His mother's portrait, and his children's, he had given up as evidence of his death; but he had never parted with hers. Oh! how he had loved her! Would to God she had loved him as dearly! But she had forsaken him, had separated him from her as one who was accursed, and whose very name was a malediction. She had exacted the uttermost farthing from him; his mother, his children, his home, his very life, to save her name from dishonor. It seemed as if this tarnished, discolored picture of herself, cherished through all his misery and desolation, spoke more deeply and poignantly to her than anything else could do. She fancied she could see him, the way-worn, haggard, weather-beaten peasant, as she had seen him last, sitting here, with the black walls shutting him out from all the world, but holding this portrait in his hands, and looking at it as she did now. And he had perished on the mountains!

Suddenly all the whirl of her brain grew quiet; the swift thoughts ceased to rush across it. She felt dull and benumbed as if she could no longer exert herself to remember or to know anything. Her eyes were weary of seeing, and the lids drooped over them. The light had become dim as if the sun had already set. Her ears were growing heavy as though no sound could ever disturb her again; when a bitter and piercing cry, such as is seldom drawn from the heart of man, penetrated through all the lethargy creeping over her. Looking up, with eyes that opened slowly and painfully, she saw her husband's face bending over her. A smile of exceeding sweetness and tenderness flitted across her face, and she tried to stretch out both her hands towards him. But the effort was the last faint token of life. They had found one another too late.



CHAPTER XXIV.

FOR ONE MOMENT

She had not uttered a word to him; but her smile and the tender gesture of her dying hands had spoken more than words. He stood motionless, gazing down upon her, and upon Phebe, who had thrown herself beside her, encircling her with her arms, as if she would snatch her away from the relentless grasp of death. A single cry of anguish had escaped him; but he was dumb now, and no sound was heard in the silent hut, except those that entered it from without. Phebe did not know what had happened, but he knew. Quite clearly, without any hope or self-deception, he knew that Felicita was dead.