st 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.

Alice Pascal looked up into Jean Merle's face with the frank and easy
self-possession of a well-bred English woman; coloring a little with
girlish shyness, yet at the same time smiling with a pleasant light in
her dark eyes. The oval of her face, and the color of her hair and eyes,
resembled, though slightly, the more beautiful face of Felicita in her
girlhood; it was simply the curious likeness which runs through some
families to the remotest branches. But her smile, the shape of her eyes,
the kneeling attitude, riveted him to the spot where he stood, and
struck him dumb. A fancy flashed across his brain, which shone like a
light from heaven. Could this girl be Hilda, his little daughter, whom
he had seen last sleeping in her cot? Was she then come, afte