CHAPTER XVI.
PARTING WORDS.
Roland advanced a few paces into the gaudy salon, with its mirrors reflecting his and Felicita's figures over and over again, and stood still, at a little distance from her, with his rough cap in his hand. He looked like one of the herdsmen with whom he had been living during the summer. There was no one else in the large room, but the night was peering in through half a dozen great uncurtained windows, which might hold many spectators watching them, as he had watched her a minute ago. She scarcely moved, but the deadly pallor of her face and the dark shining of her tearless eyes fixed upon him made him tremble as if he had been a woman weaker than herself.
"It is done," he said.
"Yes," she answered, "I have been to see him."
There was an accent in her voice, of terror and repugnance, as of one who had witnessed some horrifying sight and was compelled to bear a reluctant testimony to it. Roland himself felt a shock of antipathy at the thought of his wife seeing this unknown corpse bearing his name. He seemed to see her standing beside the dead, and looking down with those beloved eyes upon the strange face, which would dwell for evermore in her memory as well as his. Why had she subjected herself to this needless pang?
"You wished it?" he said. "You consented to my plan?"
"Yes," she answered in the same monotonous tone of reluctant testimony.
"And it was best so, Felicita," he said tenderly; "we have done the dead man no wrong. Remember he was alone, and had no friends to grieve over his strange absence. If it had been otherwise there would have been a terrible sin in our act. But it has set you free; it saves you and my mother and the children. As long as I lived you would have been in peril; but now there is a clear, safe course laid open for you. You will go home to England, where in a few months it will be forgotten that your husband was suspected of crime. Only old Clifford, and Marlowe, and two or three others will remember it. When you have the means, repay those poor people the money I owe them. And take comfort, Felicita. It would have done them no good if I had been taken and convicted; that would not have restored their money. My name then will be clear of all but suspicion, and you will make it a name for our children to inherit."