ome to seek
him, and find not even his grave, oppressed her with anguish as she
passed along the village street, till she saw the deserted hut standing
apart like an accursed place, the fit dwelling of an outcast.

The short ladder that led to it was half broken, but she could climb it
easily; and the upper part of the door was partly open, and swinging
lazily to and fro in the light breeze that was astir after the storm.
There was no difficulty in unfastening the bolt which held the lower
half; and Felicita stepped into the low room. She stood for awhile, how
long she did not know, gazing forward with wide open motionless eyes,
the brain scarcely conscious of seeing through them, though the sight
before her was reflected on their dark and glistening surface. A corner
of the roof had fallen in during the winter, and a stream of bright
light shone through it, irradiating the dim and desolate interior. The
abject poverty of her husband's dwelling-place was set in broad
daylight. The windowless walls, the bare black rafters overhead, the
rude bed of juniper branches and ferns, the log-seat, rough as it had
come out of the forest--she saw them all as if she saw them not, so busy
was her brain that it could take no notice of them just now.

So busy was it that all her life seemed to be hurrying and crowding and
whirling through it, with swift pictures starting into momentary
distinctness and dying suddenly to give place to others. It was a
terrifying and enthralling phantasmagoria which held her spell-bound on
the threshold of this ruined hovel, her husband's last shelter.

At last she roused herself, and stepped forward hesitatingly. Her eyes
had fallen upon a book or two at the end of a shelf as black as the
walls; and books had always called to her with a voice that could not be
resisted. She crept slowly and feebly across the mouldering planks of
the floor, through which she could see the grass springing on the turf
below the hut. But when she lifted up the mildewed and dust-covered
volume lying uppermost and opened it, her eyes fell first upon her own
portrait, stained, faded, nearly blotted out; yet herself as she was
when she became Roland Sefton's wife.

She sank down, faint and trembling, on the rough block of wood, and
leaned back against the mouldy walls, with the photograph in her hand,
and her eyes fastened upon it. His mother's portrait, and his
children's, he had given up as evidence of his death; but he ha