me call you darling once
more. My death provides for you, for your marriage-settlement will come
into force. You will have to live differently, my Felicita; all the
splendor and the luxury I would have surrounded you with must be lost.
But there will be enough, and my mother will manage your household well
for you. Be kind to my poor mother, and comfort her. And do not let my
children grow up with hard thoughts of their father. It will be a
painful task to you."

"Yes," she said. "Oh, Roland, we ought not to have done this thing!"

"Yet you chose," he replied.

"Yes; and I should choose it again, though I hate the falsehood," she
exclaimed vehemently. "I cannot endure shame. But all our future life
will be founded on a lie."

"Let the blame be mine, not yours," he said; "it was my plan, and there
is no going back from it now. But tell me about home. How are my
children and my mother? They are still at home?"

"No," she answered; "the police watched it day and night, till it grew
hateful to me. I shall never enter it again. We went away to the
sea-side three months ago, and there our mother and the children are
still. But when I get back we shall remove to London."

"To London!" he repeated. "Will you never go home to Riversborough?"

"Never again!" she replied. "I could not live there now; it is a hateful
spot to me. Your mother grieves bitterly over leaving it; but even she
sees that we can never live there again."

"I shall not even know how to think of you all!" he cried. "You will be
living in some strange house, which I can never picture to myself. And
the old home will be empty."

"Mr. Clifford is living in it," she said.

He threw up his hands with a gesture of grief and vexation. Whenever his
thoughts flew to the old home, the only home he had ever known, it would
be only to remember that the man he most dreaded, he who was his most
implacable enemy, was dwelling in it. And when would he cease to think
of his own birth-place and the birth-place of his children, the home
where Felicita had lived? It would be impossible to blot the vivid
memory of it from his brain.

"I shall never see it again," he said; "but I should have felt less
banished from you if I could have thought of you as still at home. We
are about to part forever, Felicita--as fully as if I lay dead down
yonder, as men will think I do."

"Yes," she answered, with a mournful stillness.

"Even if we wished to hold any intercourse with