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.