chafed her; and she was always searching for fresh modes of conveying
her own feeling to other souls. Possibly the enforced speechlessness in
which she had passed her early years had aided in creating this
passionate desire to impart herself to those about her in unfettered
communion, and she ardently delighted in the same unreserved confidence
in those who conversed with her. But now she was doomed to bear the
burden of a secret fraught with strange and painful consequences to
those whom she loved, if time should ever divulge it.

The winter months passed away cheerlessly, though she worked with more
persistent energy than ever before, partly to drive away the thoughts
that troubled her. She heard from Mr. Clifford, but not more frequently
than usual, and Jean Merle did not venture upon sending her a line of
his hand-writing. Mr. Clifford spoke in guarded terms of the comfort he
found in the companionship of his attendant, in spite of his being a sad
and moody man. Now and then he told Phebe that this attendant of his had
gone for a day or two to her solitary little house on the uplands, of
which Mr. Clifford kept the key, and that he stayed there a day or two,
finishing the half-carved blocks of oak her father had left incomplete.
It would have been a happier existence, she knew, for himself, if Jean
Merle had gone to dwell there altogether; but it was along this path of
self-sacrifice and devotion alone lay the road back to a Christian life.

One point troubled Phebe's conscience more than any other. Ought she not
at least to tell Canon Pascal what she knew? She could not help feeling
that this second fraud would seem worse in his estimation than the first
one. And Felicita, the very soul of truth and honor, had connived at it!
It seemed immeasurably more terrible in Phebe's own eyes. To her money
had so small a value, it lay on so low a level in the scale of life,
that a crime in connection with it had far less guilt than one against
the affections. And how unutterable a sin against all who loved him had
Roland and Felicita fallen into! She recalled his mother's mourning for
him through many long years, and her belief in death that she was going
soon to rejoin the beloved son whom she had lost. Her own grief she put
aside, but there was the deep, boyish sorrow of Felix, and even little
Hilda's fatherlessness, as the children had grown up through the various
stages of childhood. It might have been bad for them to bear