tumble
along a dark and rugged track through the rest of his years. There was
no cheering gleam beckoning him to a happy future. But though it was
thorny and obscure it was not an ignoble path, and it might end at last
even for him in the welcome words, "Well done, good and faithful
servant; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

His mind was made up before he reached the valley. He could not unravel
the warp and woof of his life. The gossamer threads of the webs he had
begun to weave about himself so lightly in the heyday of his youth and
prosperity and happiness had thickened into cables and petrified; it was
impossible to break through the coil of them or find a way out of it.
Roland Sefton had died many years ago. Let him remain dead.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE FINAL RESOLVE.

It was dark, with the pitchy darkness of a village street, where the
greater part of the population were gone to bed, when he passed through
Engelberg towards the hotel, where Phebe must be awaiting his return
anxiously. In carrying out his project it would be well for him to have
as little as possible to do with the inmates of the hotel, and he
approached it cautiously. All the ground-floor was dark, except for a
glimmer of light in a little room at the end of a long passage; but the
windows of the _salon_ on the floor above were lit up, and Jean Merle
stepped quietly up the staircase unheard and unseen.

Phebe was sitting by a table, her head buried in her arms, which rested
upon it--a forlorn and despondent attitude. She lifted up her face as he
entered and gazed pitifully into his; but for a minute or two neither of
them spoke. He stood just within the door, looking towards her as he had
done on the fateful night when Felicita had told him that she chose his
death rather than her share of the disgrace attaching to his crime. This
day just drawn to a close had been the bitterest fruit of the seed then
sown. Jean Merle's face, on which there was stamped an expression of
intense but patient suffering, steadfastly met Phebe's aching eyes.

"She is dead!" she murmured.

"I knew it," he answered.

"I did not know what to do," she went on after a slight pause, and
speaking in a pitiful and deprecating tone.

"Poor Phebe!" he said; "but I am come to tell you what I have resolved
to do--what seems best for us all to do. We must act as if I was only
what I seem to be, a stranger to you, a passing guide, who has no more
to do with these th