Felicita closed her eyes with a feeling of helpless misery. She could hardly give a thought to Felix and the words he uttered; yet it was those words which brought a flood of hidden memories and fears sweeping over her shrinking soul. It was so long since she had thought much of Roland! She had persuaded herself that as so many years had passed by bringing to her no hint or token of his existence, he must be dead; and as one dead passes presently out of the active thoughts, busy only with the present, so had her husband passed away from her mind into some dim, hidden cell of memory, with which she had long ceased to trouble herself. Her husband seemed to stand before her as she had seen him last, a haggard, way-worn, ruined man, beggared and stripped of all that makes life desirable. And this was only six months after he had lost all. What would he be after thirteen years if he was living still? But if it had appeared to her out of the question to face and bear the ignominy and disgrace he had brought upon her thirteen years ago, how utterly impossible it was now. She could never retrace her steps. To confess the deception she had herself consented to, and taken part in, would be to pull down with her own hands the fair edifice of her life. The very name she had made for herself, and the broader light in which her fame had placed her, made any repentance impossible. "A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid." Her hill was not as lofty as she had once fancied it would be; but still she was not on the low and safer level of the plain. She was honorably famous. She could not stain her honor by the acknowledgment of dishonor. The chief question, after all, was whether Roland was alive or dead. Her colorless face and closed eyes, the expression of unutterable perplexity and anguish in her knitted brows and quivering lips, filled Felix with wonder and grief. He had risen from his kneeling posture at her feet, and now his reverential awe of her yielded to the tender compassion of a man for a weak and suffering woman. He drew her beloved head on to his breast, and held her in a firm and loving grasp. "I would not grieve or pain you for worlds," he said falteringly, "nor would Alice. I love you better than myself; as much as I love her. We will talk of it another day, mother." She pressed close to him, and he felt her arms strained about him, as if she could not hold him near enough to her. It seemed to him as if she was striving to draw him into the very heart of her motherhood; but she knew how deep the gulf was between her and him, and shuddered at her own loneliness. "It is losing you, my son," she whispered with her quivering lips. "No, no," he said eagerly; "it is not losing me, but finding another child. Don't take a gloomy view of it, mother. I shall be as happy as my father was with you."