She shook her head mutely. A long, intricate path of falsehood stretched before her, from which she could not turn aside, a maze in which she was already entangled and lost; but her lips were reluctant to utter the first words of untruth.
"These were found on him," he continued, pointing to the children's portraits. "I am afraid we cannot doubt the facts. The description is like him, and his papers and passport place the identity beyond a question. But I have dispatched a trusty messenger to Switzerland to make further inquiries, and ascertain every particular."
"Will he see him?" asked Felicita with a start of terror.
"No, my poor girl," said the old banker; "it happened ten days ago, and he was buried, so they say, almost immediately. But I wish to have a memorial stone put over his grave, that if any of us, I or you, or the children, should wish to visit it at some future time, it should not be past finding."
He spoke tenderly and sorrowfully, as if he imagined himself standing beside the grave of his old friend's son, recalling the past and grieving over it. His own boy was buried in some unknown common fosse in Paris. Felicita looked up at him with her strange, steady, searching gaze.
"You have forgiven him?" she said.
"Yes," he answered; "men always forgive the dead."
"Oh, Roland! Roland!" she cried, wringing her hands for an instant. Then, resuming her composure, she gazed quietly into his pitiful face again.
"It is kind of you to think of his grave," she said; "but I shall never go there, nor shall the children go, if I can help it."
"Hush!" he answered imperatively. "You, then, have not forgiven him? Yet I forgive him, who have lost most."