"No, not impossible!" she cried earnestly; "it was not an unpardonable sin. Even if he had gone to prison, as he would, he might have faced the world when he came out again; and if he'd done all the good he could in it, it might have been hard to convince them he was good, but it would never be impossible. If God forgives us, sooner or later our fellow-creatures will forgive us, if we live a true life. I would have stood by him in the face of the world, and you would, and Madame and the children. He would not have been left alone, and it would have ended in every one else coming round to us. Oh, why should he die when you were just going to see each other again!"
Felicita had sunk down again into the chair which had been carried for her to the shore, and Phebe sat down on the sands at her feet. She looked up tearfully into Felicita's wan and shrunken face.
"Did any one ever win back their good name?" asked Felicita with quivering lips.
"Among us they do sometimes," she answered. "I knew a working-man who had been in jail five years, and he became a Christian while he was there, and he came back home to his own village. He was one of the best men I ever knew, and when he died there was such a funeral as had never been seen in the parish church. Why should it not be so? If God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, why shouldn't we forgive? If we are faithful and just, we shall."
"It could never be," said Felicita; "it cannot be the same as if Roland had not been guilty. No one can blot out the past; it is eternal."
"Yes," she replied, covering Felicita's hand with kisses and tears; "but oh, we love him more now than ever. He is gone into the land of thick darkness, and I cannot follow him in my thoughts. It is like a gulf between us and him. Even if he had been farthest away from us in the world—anywhere—we could imagine what he was doing; but we cannot see him or call across the gulf to him. It is all unknown. Only God knows!"
"God!" echoed Felicita; "if there is a God, let Him help me, for I am the most wretched woman on His earth to-day."
"God cannot keep from helping us all," answered Phebe. "He cannot rest while we are wretched. I understand it better than I used to do. I cannot rest myself while the poorest creature about me is in pain that I can help. It is impossible that He should not care. That would be an awful thing to think; that would make His love and pity less than ours. This I know, that God loves every creature He has made. And oh, He must have loved him, though he was suffered to fall over that dreadful precipice, and die before you saw him. It happened before you reached Engelberg?"
"Yes," said Felicita, shivering.
"The papers were sent on to Mr. Clifford," continued Phebe, "and he sent for me to come with him, and see you before the news got into the papers. It will be in to-morrow. But I knew more than he did, and I came on here to speak to you. Shall you tell him you went there to meet him?"