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.

The dread of it had haunted him from the moment that he had heard of her hurried departure in quest of him. When he read Phebe's words, imploring him to follow them, the recollection had flashed across him of how the thread of Lord Riversdale's life had snapped under the strain of unusual anxiety and fatigue. Felicita's own delicate health had been failing for some months past. As swiftly as he could follow he had pursued them; but her impatient and feverish haste had prevented him from overtaking them in time. What might have been the result if he had reached her sooner he could not tell. That there could ever have been any knitting together again of the tie that had ever united them seemed impossible. Death alone, either hers or his, could have touched her heart to the tenderness of her farewell smile and gesture.

In after life Jean Merle never spoke of that hour of agony. But there was nothing in the past which dwelt so deeply or lived again so often in his memory. He had suffered before; but it seemed as nothing to the intensity of the anguish that had befallen him now. The image of Felicita's white and dying face lying against the darkened walls of the hovel where she had gone to seek him, was indelibly printed on his brain. He would see it till the hour of his own death.

He lifted her up, holding her once more in his arms, and clasping her to his heart, as he carried her through the village street to the hotel. Phebe walked beside him, as yet only thinking that Felicita had fainted. His old neighbors crowded out of their houses, scarcely recognizing Jean Merle in this Monsieur in his good English dress, but with redoubled curiosity when they saw who it was thus bearing the strange English lady in his arms. When he had carried her to the hotel, and up-stairs to the room where he had watched beside the stranger who had borne his name, he broke through the gathering crowd of onlookers, and fled to his familiar solitudes among the mountains.

He had always told himself that Felicita was dead to him. There had not been in his heart the faintest hope that she could ever again be anything more to him than a memory and a dream. When he was in England, though he had not been content until he had seen his children and his old home, he had never sought to get a glimpse of her, so far beyond him and above him. But now that she was indeed dead, those beloved eyes closed forever more from the light of the sun, and the familiar earth never again to be trodden by her feet, the awful chasm set between them made him feel as if he was for the first time separated from her. Only an hour ago and his voice could have reached her in words of entreaty and of passionate repentance and humble self-renunciation. They could have spoken face to face, and he might have had a brief interval for pouring out his heart to her. But there had been no word uttered between them. There had been only that one moment in which her soul looked back upon him with a glance of tenderness, before she was gone from him beyond recall. He came to himself, out of the confused agony of his grief, as the sun was setting. He found himself in a wild and barren wilderness of savage rocks, with a small black tarn lying at his feet, which just caught the glimmer of the setting sun on its lurid surface. The silence about him was intense. Gray clouds stretched across the mountains, out of which a few sad peaks of rock rose against the gray sky. The snowy dome of the Titlis towering above the rest looked down on him out of the shadow of the clouded heavens with a ghostly paleness. All the world about him was cold and wan, and solemn as the face of the dead. There was death up here and in the valley yonder; but down in the valley it bore too dear and too sorrowful a form.

As the twilight deepened, the recollection of Phebe's loneliness and her distress at his absence at last roused him. He could no longer leave her, bewildered by this new trouble, and with slow and reluctant steps he retraced his path through the deep gloom of the forests to the village. There was much to be turned over in his mind and to be decided upon before he reached the bustling hotel and the gaping throng of spectators, marvelling at Jean Merle's reappearance under circumstances so unaccountable. He had met with Phebe as she returned from starting Felicita in the first boat, and they had waited for the next. At Grafenort they had dismissed their carriage, thinking they could enter the valleys with less observation on foot; and perhaps meet with Felicita in such a manner as to avoid making his return known in Engelberg. He had turned aside to take shelter in his old hut, whilst Phebe went on to find Felicita, when his bitter cry of pain had called her back to him. The villagers would probably take him for a courier in attendance upon these ladies, if he acted as one when he reached the hotel. But how was he to act?

Two courses were open to him. There was no longer any reason to dread a public trial and conviction for the crime he had committed so many years ago. It was quite practicable to return to England, account plausibly for his disappearance and the mistake as to identity which had caused a stranger to be buried in his name, and take up his life again as Roland Sefton. It was improbable that any searching investigation should be made into his statements. Who would be interested in doing it? But the old memories and suspicions would be awakened and strengthened a hundred-fold by the mystery surrounding his return. No one could compel him to reveal his secret, he had simply to keep his lips closed in impenetrable silence. True he would be a suspected man, with a disgraceful secrecy hanging like a cloud about him. He could not live so at Riversborough, among his old towns-people, of whom he had once been a leader. He must find some new sphere and dwell in it, always dreading the tongue of rumor.

And his son and daughter? How would they regard him if he maintained an obstinate and ambiguous silence towards them? They were no longer little children, scarcely separate from their father, seeing through his eyes, and touching life only through him. They were separate individuals, living souls, with a personality of their own, the more free from his influence because of his long absence and supposed death. It was a young man he must meet in Felix, a critic and a judge like other men; but with a known interest in the criticism and the judgment he had to pass upon his father, and less apt to pass it lightly. His son would ponder deeply over any account he might give of himself. Hilda, too, was at a sensitive and delicate point of girlhood, when she would inevitably shrink from any contact with the suspicion and doubt that would surround this strange return after so many years of disappearance.

Yet how could he let them know the terrible fraud he had committed for their mother's sake and with her connivance? Felix knew of his other defalcations; but Hilda was still ignorant of them. If he returned to them with the truth in his lips, they would lose the happy memory of their mother and their pride in her fame. He understood only too well how dominant must have been her influence over them, not merely by the tender common ties of motherhood, but by the fascinating charm of her whole nature, reserved and stately as it had been. He must betray her and lessen her memory in their sorrowful esteem. To them, if not to the world, he must disclose all, or resolve to remain a stranger to them forever. During the last six months it had seemed to him that a humble path lay before him, following which he might again live a life of lowly discipleship. He had repented with a bitter repentance, and out of the depths into which he had fallen he had cried unto God and been delivered. He believed that he had received God's forgiveness, as he knew that he had received men's forgiveness. Out of the wreck of his former life he had constructed a little raft and trusted to it bearing him safely through what remained of the storm of life. If Felicita had lived he would have remained in the service of his father's old friend, proving himself of use in numberless ways; not merely as an attendant, but in assisting him with the affairs of the bank, with which he was more conversant, from his early acquaintanceship with the families transacting business with it, than the stranger who was acting manager could be. He had not been long enough in Riversborough to gain any influence in the town as a poor foreigner, but there had been a hope dawning within that he might again do some good in his native place, the dearer to him because of his long and dreary banishment. In time he might perform some work worthy of his forefathers, though under another name. If he could so live as to leave behind him the memory of a sincere and simple Christian, who had denied himself daily to live a righteous, sober, and godly life, and had cheerfully taken up his cross to follow Christ, he would in some measure atone for the disgrace Roland Sefton's defalcations had brought upon the name of Christ.

This humble, ambitious career was still before him if he could forego the joy of making himself known to his children—a doubtful joy. For had he not cut himself from them by his reckless and despairing abandonment of them in their childhood? He could bring them nothing now but sorrow and shame. The sacrifice would be on their side, not his. It needs all the links of all the years to bind parents and children in an indestructible chain; and if he attempted to unite the broken links it could only be by a knowledge of their mother's error as well as his. Let him sacrifice himself for the last and final time to Felicita and the fair name she had made for herself.

He was stumbling along in the dense darkness of the forest with no gleam of light to guide him on his way, and his feet were constantly snared in the knotted roots of the trees intersecting the path. So must he stumble along a dark and rugged track through the rest of his years. There was no cheering gleam beckoning him to a happy future. But though it was thorny and obscure it was not an ignoble path, and it might end at last even for him in the welcome words, "Well done, good and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

His mind was made up before he reached the valley. He could not unravel the warp and woof of his life. The gossamer threads of the webs he had begun to weave about himself so lightly in the heyday of his youth and prosperity and happiness had thickened into cables and petrified; it was impossible to break through the coil of them or find a way out of it. Roland Sefton had died many years ago. Let him remain dead.