nd looking as if
they were about to slip over them. He felt his head grow giddy as he
looked at them, and thought of the children at play in such dangerous
playgrounds. There were a few gray clouds hanging about the Titlis, and
caught upon the sharp horns of the rugged peaks around the valley. Every
peak and precipice he knew; they had been his refuge in the hours of his
greatest anguish. But these palsied limbs and this giddy head could not
be trusted to carry him there again. He had lost his last hope of making
any atonement. Hope was gone; was he to lose his indomitable courage
also? It was the last faculty which made his present life endurable.

He lay motionless for hours, neither listening nor looking. Yet he
heard, for the memory of it often came back to him in after years, the
tinkling of innumerable bells from the pastures below him, and around
him; and the voices of many waterfalls rushing down through the
pine-forests into the valley; and the tossing to and fro of the
interwoven branches of the trees. And he saw the sunlight stealing from
one point to another, chased by the shadows of the clouds, that gathered
and dispersed, dimming the blue sky for a little time, and then leaving
it brighter and deeper than before. He was unconscious of it all; he was
even unaware that his brain was at work at all, until suddenly, like a
flash, there rose upon him the clear, resolute, unchangeable
determination, "I will go to England."

He started up at once, and seized his bundle and his alpenstock. The
afternoon was far advanced, but there was time enough to reach the
Engstlenalp, where he could stay the night, and go on in the morning to
Meiringen. He could be in England in three days.

Three days: so short a time separated him from the country and the home
from which he had been exiled so many years. Any day during those
fourteen years he might have started homeward as he was doing now; but
there had not been the irresistible hunger in his heart that at this
moment drove him thither. He had been vainly seeking to satisfy himself
with husks; but even these, dry and empty, and bitter as they were, had
failed him. He had lost all; and having lost all, he was coming to
himself.

There was not the slightest fear of detection in his mind. A gray-haired
man with bowed shoulders, and seamed and marred face, who had lost every
trace of the fastidiousness, which had verged upon foppery in the
handsome and prosperous Roland Sef