s isolation from his fellow-creatures had aged
him. This bitter calamity added many years to his actual age, and he
began to realize that his right hand was forgetting its cunning, his eye
for beauty was growing dim, and his craft failing him. The long, light
summer days kept him for a while from utter hopelessness. But as the
autumn winds began to moan and mutter round the house he told himself
that his work was done, and that soon Phebe would be a friendless and
penniless orphan.

"I ought not to have let Roland Sefton go," he thought to himself; "if
I'd done my duty he would have been paying for his sin now, and maybe
there would have been some redress for us that lost by him. None of his
people will come to poverty like my Phebe. I could have held up my head
if I had not helped him to escape from punishment."

CHAPTER XII.

RECKLESS OF LIFE.

If old Marlowe, or Mr. Clifford himself, could have followed Roland
Sefton during his homeless wanderings, their rigorous sense of justice
would have been satisfied that he was not escaping punishment, though he
might elude the arbitrary penalty of the law.

As the summer advanced, and the throng of yearly tourists poured into
the playground of Europe from every country, but especially from
England, he was driven away from all the towns and villages where he
might by chance be recognized by some fellow-countryman. Up into the
mountain pastures he retreated, where he rambled from one chalet to
another, sleeping on beds of fodder, with its keen night air piercing
through the apertures of the roof and walls, yet bringing with it those
intolerable stenches which exhale from the manure and mire lying
ankle-deep round each picturesque little hut. The yelping of the
watch-dogs; the snoring of the tired herdsmen lying within arm's length
of him; the shrill tinkling of cow-bells, musical enough by day and in
the distance, but driving sleep away too harshly; the sickness and
depression produced by unwholesome food, and the utter compulsory
abandonment of all his fastidious and dainty personal habits, made his
mere bodily life intolerable to him. He had borne something like these
discomforts and privations for a day or two at a time, when engaged in
Alpine climbing, but that he should be forced to live a life compared
with which that of an Irish bog-trotter was decent and civilized, was a
daily torment to him.

It is true that during the long hours of daylight he wandered a