He was stumbling along in the dense darkness of the forest with no gleam of light to guide him on his way, and his feet were constantly snared in the knotted roots of the trees intersecting the path. So must he stumble 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.