o peace for him, either in the high
Alps or the most secluded valleys.

How could there be peace while memory and conscience were gnawing at his
heart? In a dreary round his thoughts went back to the first beginnings
of the road that had led him hither; with that vague feeling which all
of us have when retracing the irrevocable past, as if by some mighty
effort of our will we could place ourselves at the starting-point again
and run our race--oh, how differently!

Roland could almost fix the date when he had first wished that Mr.
Clifford's bonds, bequeathed to him, were already his own. He
recollected the very day when old Marlowe had asked him to invest his
money for him in some safe manner for Phebe's benefit, and how he had
persuaded himself that nothing could be safer than to use it for his own
purposes, and to pay a higher interest than the old man could get
elsewhere. What he had done for him had been still easier to do for
other clients--ignorant men and women who knew nothing of business, and
left it all to him, gratefully pleased with the good interest he paid
them. The web had been woven with almost invisible threads at the first,
but the finest thread among them was a heavy cable now.

But the one thought that haunted him, never leaving him for an instant
in these terrible solitudes, was the thought of Felicita. His mother he
could forget sometimes, or remember her with a dewy tenderness at his
heart, as if he could feel her pitiful love clinging to him still; and
his children he dreamed of at times in a day-dream, as playing merrily
without him, in the blissful ignorance of childhood. But Felicita, who
did not love him as his mother did, and could not remain in ignorance of
his crime! Was she not something like these pure, distant snowy
pinnacles, inapproachable and repellent, with icy-cold breath which
petrified all lips that drew too near to them? And he had set a stain
upon that purity as white as the driven snow. The name he had given to
her was tarnished, and would be publicly dishonored if he failed in
evading the penalty he merited. His death alone could save her from
notorious and intolerable disgrace.

But though he was reckless of his life, he could not bring himself to be
guilty of suicide. Death was wooing him in many forms, day by day, to
seek refuge with him. When his feet slipped among the yawning crevasses
of the glaciers, the smallest wilful negligence would have buried him in
their blu