trious and thrifty, a man in the prime of life, the commune left
him alone.

He seemed to have taken it as a self-imposed task that he should have
the charge of the granite cross, erected over the man whose death he had
witnessed. He was recognized in Engelberg as the man who had spent the
last hours with the buried Englishman, but no suspicion attached to him.
So careful was he of the monument that it was generally rumored he
received a sum of money yearly for keeping it in order. No doubt the
friends of the rich Englishman, who had erected so handsome a stone to
his memory, made it worth the man's while to attend to it. Besides this
grave, which he could not keep himself from haunting, Engelberg
attracted him by its double association with Felicita. Here he had seen
her for the first and for the last time. There was no other spot in the
world, except the home he had lost forever, so full of memories of her.
He could live over again every instant of each interview with her, with
all the happy interval that lay between them. The rest of his life was
steeped in shadow; the earlier years before he knew Felicita were pale
and dim; the time since he lost her was unreal and empty, like a
confused dream.

After a while a dull despondency succeeded to the acute misery of his
first winter and summer. His second fraud had been terribly successful;
in a certain measure he was duped by it himself. All the world believed
him to be dead, and he lived as a shadow among shadows. The wild and
solitary ice-peaks he sometimes scaled seemed to him the unsubstantial
phantasmagoria of a troubled sleep. He wondered with a dull amazement if
the crevasses which yawned before him would swallow him up, or the
shuddering violence of an avalanche bury him beneath it. His life had
been as a tale that is told, even to its last word, death.

PART II.

CHAPTER I.

AFTER MANY YEARS.

The busy, monotonous years ran through their course tranquilly, marked
only by a change of residence from the narrow little house suited to
Felicita's slender means to a larger, more commodious, and more
fashionable dwelling-place in a West End square. Both Felicita and Phebe
had won their share of public favor and a fair measure of fame; and the
new home was chosen partly on account of an artist's studio with a
separate entrance, through which Phebe could go in and out, and admit
her visitors and sitters, in independence of the rest of the household.