an they pay me," she answered ingenuously.

The publisher shrugged his shoulders. If her manuscript had contained
Milton's "Paradise Lost" or Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," such an
admission would have swamped it. There is no fate swift enough for an
unknown author who asks for more money than that which a publisher's
sense of justice awards to him.

"I am sorry I can do nothing for you," he said, "but my time is very
precious. Good-morning--No thanks, I beg. It would be a pleasure, I am
sure, if I could do anything."

Felicita's heart sank very low as she turned into the dismal street and
trod the muddy pavement. A few illusions shrivelled up that wintry
morning under that murky sky. The name she was so fearful of staining;
the name she had fondly imagined as noised from mouth to mouth; the name
for which she had demanded so great a sacrifice, and had sacrificed so
much herself, was not known in those circles where she might most have
expected to find it a passport to attention and esteem. It had travelled
very little indeed beyond the narrow sphere of Riversborough.

CHAPTER XX.

A DUMB MAN'S GRIEF.

The winter fogs which made London so gloomy did not leave the country
sky clear and bright. All the land lay under a shroud of mist and vapor;
and even on the uplands round old Marlowe's little farmstead the heavens
were gray and cold, and the wide prospect shut out by a curtain of dim
clouds.

The rude natural tracks leading over the moor to the farm became almost
impassable. The thatched roof was sodden with damp, and the deep eaves
shed off the water with the sound of a perpetual dropping. Behind the
house the dark, storm-beaten, distorted firs, and the solitary yew-tree
blown all to one side, grew black with the damp. The isolation of the
little dwelling-place was as complete as if a flood had covered the face
of the earth, leaving its two inmates the sole survivors of the human
race.

Several months had passed since old Marlowe had executed his last piece
of finished work. The blow that Rowland Sefton's dishonesty had
inflicted upon him had paralyzed his heart--that most miserable of all
kinds of paralysis. He could still go about, handle his tools, set his
thin old fingers to work; but as soon as he had put a few marks upon his
block of oak his heart died with him, and he threw down his useless
tools with a sob as bitter as ever broke from an old man's lips.

There was no relief for him, as for