ntellect, was, in reality, the echo only of thought long since given to
mankind by other minds, in other words, often better than her own. Her
own silent claim to genius was greatly modified; she was humbler than
she had been. But she knew painfully that her name was now a
hundred-fold better known than it had been while she was yet only the
wife of a Riversborough banker. All her work for the last fourteen years
had placed it more and more prominently before the public. Any scandal
attaching to it now would be blazoned farther and wider, in deeper and
more enduring characters, than if her life as an author had been a
failure.

The subtle hope, very real, vague as it was, that her husband was in
truth dead, gathered strength. The silence that had engulfed him had
been so profound that it seemed impossible he should still be treading
the same earth as herself, and wearing through its slow and commonplace
days, sleeping and waking, eating and drinking like other men. Felicita
was not superstitious, but there was in her that deep-rooted,
instinctive sense of mystery in this double life of ours, dividing our
time into sleeping and waking hours, which is often apt to make our
dreams themselves omens of importance. She had never dreamed of Roland
as she did of those belonging to her who had already passed into the
invisible world about us. His spirit was not free, perhaps, from its
earthly fetters so as to be able to visit her, and haunt her sleeping
fancies. But now she began to dream of him frequently, and often in the
daytime flashes of memory darted vividly across her brain, lighting up
the dark forgotten past, and recalling to her some word of his, or a
glance merely. It was an inward persecution from which she could not
escape, but it seemed to her to indicate that her persecutor was no more
a denizen of this world.

To get rid of these haunting memories as much as possible, she made such
a change in her mode of life as astonished all about her. She no longer
shut herself up in her library; as she had told Phebe, she resolved to
write no more, nor attempt to write, until she had been to Engelberg.
She seemed wishful to attract friends to her, and she renewed old
acquaintanceships with members of her own family which she had allowed
to drop during these many years. No sooner was it evident that Felicita
Sefton was willing to come out of the extremely quiet and solitary life
she had led hitherto, and take her place in so