answer, the door was flung open, and Felix,
breathless with rapid running, rushed into the room and flung himself
into his mother's arms. No words could come at first; but he drew long
and terrible sobs. The boy's upturned face was pale, and his eyes,
tearless as her own had been, were fastened in an agony upon hers. She
could not soothe or comfort him, for she knew his grief was wasted on a
falsehood; but she looked down on her son's face with a feeling of
terror.

"Oh, my father! my beloved father!" he sobbed at last. "Is he dead,
mother? You never told me anything that wasn't true. He can't be dead,
though Phebe says so. Is it true, mother?"

Felicita bent her head till it rested on the boy's uplifted face. His
sobs shook her, and the close clasp of his arms was painful; but she
neither spoke nor moved. She heard Phebe coming in, and knew that
Roland's mother was there, and Hilda came to clasp her little arms about
her as Felix was doing. But her heart had gone back to the moment when
Roland had knelt beside her in the quiet little church, and she had said
to him deliberately, "I choose your death." He was dead to her.

"Is it true, mother?" wailed Felix. "Oh, tell me it isn't true!"

"It is true," she answered. But the long, tense strain had been too much
for her strength, and she sank fainting on the ground.

CHAPTER XIX.

AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER.

It was all in vain that Mr. Clifford tried to turn Felicita from her
resolution. Phebe cordially upheld her, and gave her courage to persist
against all arguments. Both of them cared little for poverty--Phebe
because she knew it, Felicita because she did not know it. Felicita had
never known a time when money had to be considered; it had come to her
pretty much in the same way as the air she breathed and the food she
ate, without any care or prevision of her own. Phebe, on the other hand,
knew that she could earn her own living at any time by the work of her
strong young arms, and her wants were so few that they could easily be
supplied.

It was decided before Phebe went home again, and decided in the face of
Mr. Clifford's opposition, that a small house should be taken in London,
and partly furnished from the old house at Riversborough, where Felicita
would be in closer and easier communication with the publishers. Mr.
Clifford laughed to himself at the idea that she could gain a
maintenance by literature, as all the literary people he had ever met or
he