"Yes," she answered. "I am travelling under Phebe Marlowe's name. Ask for Mrs. Marlowe."
She turned away and walked slowly and feebly down the aisle; and he watched her, as he had watched the light tread of the young girl eleven years ago, passing through alternate sunshine and shadow. There was no sunshine now. Was it possible that so long a time had passed since then? Could it be true that for ten years she had been his wife, and that the tie between them was forever dissolved? From this day he was to be dead to her and to all the world. He was about to pass voluntarily into a condition of death amid life, as utterly bereft of all that had once been his as if the grave had closed over him. Roland Sefton was to exist no more.
CHAPTER XV.
A SECOND FRAUD.
Roland Sefton went back to the room in which the corpse of the stranger was now lying. The women were gone, and he turned down the sheet to look at the face of the man who was about to bear his name and the disgrace of his crime into the safe asylum of the grave. It was perfectly calm, with no trace of the night's suffering upon it; there was even a faint vestige of a smile about the mouth, as of one who sleeps well, and has pleasant dreams. He was apparently about Roland's own age, and a description given by strangers would not be such as would lead to any suspicion that there could have been a mistake as to identity. Roland looked long upon it before covering it up again, and then he sat down beside the bed and opened the pocket-book.
There were notes in it worth fifty pounds, but not many papers. There was a memorandum made here and there of the places he had visited, and the last entry was dated the day before at Engstlenalp. Roland knew every step of the road, and for a while he seemed to himself to be this traveller, starting from the little inn, not yet vacated by its peasant landlord, but soon to be left to icy solitude, and taking the narrow path along the Engstlensee, toiling up the Joch pass under the mighty Wendenstöcke and the snowy Titlis, clear of clouds from base to summit yesterday. The traveller must have had a guide with him, some peasant or herdsman probably, as far as the Trübsee Alp; for even in summer the route was difficult to find. The guide had put him on to the path for Engelberg, and left him to make his way along the precipitous slopes of the Pfaffenwand. All this would be discovered when an official inquiry was made into the accident. In the mean time it was necessary to invest this stranger with his own identity.
There were two or three well-worn letters in the pocket-book, but they contained nothing of importance. It seemed true, what the dying man had said, that there was no link of kinship or friendship binding him specially to his fellow-men. Roland opened his own pocket-book, and looked over a letter or two which he had carried about with him, one of them a childish note from Felix, preferring some simple request. His passport was there also, and his mother's portrait and those of the children, over which his eyes brooded with a hungry sorrow in his heart. He looked at them for the last time. But Felicita's portrait he could not bring himself to give up. She would be dead to him, and he to her. In England she would live among her friends as his widow, pitied, and comforted, and beloved. But what would the coming years bring to him? All that would remain to him of the past would be a fading photograph only.
So long he lingered over this mournful conflict that he was at last aroused from it by the entrance of the landlord, and the mayor and other officials, who had come to look at the body of the dead. Roland's pocket-book lay open on the bed, and he was still gazing at the portraits of his children. He raised his sunburnt face as they came in, and rose to meet them.
"This traveller," he said, "gave to me his pocket-book as I watched beside him last night. It is here, containing his passport, a few letters, and fifty pounds in notes, which he told me to keep, but which I wish to give to the commune."