For three days Jean Merle wandered about the eternal frosts of the ice-bound peaks and snow-fields of the mountains around him, living he did not himself know how. It was not money he had lost. Like old Marlowe he realized how poor a symbol money was of the long years of ceaseless toil, the days of self-denial, the hours of anxious thoughts it represented. And besides this darker side, it stood also for the hopes he had cherished, vaguely, almost unconsciously, but still with strong earnestness. He had fled from the penalty the just laws of his country demanded from him, taking refuge in a second and more terrible fraud, and now God suffered him not to make this small reparation for his sin, or to taste the single drop of satisfaction that he hoped for in realizing the object he had set before him. There was no place of repentance for him; not a foot-hold in all the wide wilderness of his banishment on which he could stand, and repair one jot a little of the injury he had inflicted upon his fellow-men. What passed through his soul those three days, amidst the ice-solitudes where no life was, and where the only sounds that spoke to him were the wild awful tones of nature in her dreariest haunts, he could never tell; he could hardly recall it to his own memory. He felt as utterly alone as if no other human being existed on the face of the earth; yet as if he alone had to bear the burden of all the falsehood, and dishonesty and dishonor of the countless generations of false and dishonorable men which this earth has seen. All hope was dead now. There was nothing more to work for, or to look forward to. Nothing lay before him but his solitary blank life in the miserable hut below. There was no interest in the world for him but Roland Sefton's grave. He descended the mountain-side at last. For the first time since he had left the valley he noticed that the sun was shining, and that the whole landscape below him was bathed in light. The village was all astir, and travellers were coming and going. It was not in the sight of all the world that he could drag his weary feet to the cemetery, where Roland Sefton's grave was; and he turned aside into his own hut to wait till the evening was come. At last the sun went down upon his misery, and the cool shades of the long twilight crept on. He made a circuit round the village to reach the spot he longed to visit. His downcast eyes saw nothing but the rough ground he trod, and the narrow path his footsteps had made to the solitary grave, until he was close to it; and then, looking up to read the name upon the cross, he discerned the figure of a girl kneeling before it, and carefully planting a little slip of ivy into the soil beneath it. CHAPTER X. ALICE PASCAL.