"Never again!" she replied. "I could not live there now; it is a hateful spot to me. Your mother grieves bitterly over leaving it; but even she sees that we can never live there again."
"I shall not even know how to think of you all!" he cried. "You will be living in some strange house, which I can never picture to myself. And the old home will be empty."
"Mr. Clifford is living in it," she said.
He threw up his hands with a gesture of grief and vexation. Whenever his thoughts flew to the old home, the only home he had ever known, it would be only to remember that the man he most dreaded, he who was his most implacable enemy, was dwelling in it. And when would he cease to think of his own birth-place and the birth-place of his children, the home where Felicita had lived? It would be impossible to blot the vivid memory of it from his brain.
"I shall never see it again," he said; "but I should have felt less banished from you if I could have thought of you as still at home. We are about to part forever, Felicita—as fully as if I lay dead down yonder, as men will think I do."
"Yes," she answered, with a mournful stillness.
"Even if we wished to hold any intercourse with each other," he continued, gazing wistfully at her, "it would be dangerous to us both. It is best for us both to be dead to one another."
"It is best," she assented; "only if you were ever in great straits, if you could not earn your living, you might contrive to let me know."
"There is no fear of that," he answered bitterly. "Felicita, you never loved me as I love you."
"No," she said, with the same inexpressible sadness, yet calmness, in her voice and face; "how could I? I was a child when you married me; we were both children. There is such a difference between us. I suppose I should never love any one very much—not as you mean. It is not in my nature. I can live alone, Roland. All of you, even the children, seem very far away from me. But I grieve for you in my inmost soul. If I could undo what you have done I would gladly lay down my life. If I could only undo what we did this morning! The shadow of it is growing darker and darker upon me. And yet it seemed so wise; it seems so still. We shall be safe again, all of us, and we have done that dead man no wrong."