nce impossible. "A city that is
set on a hill cannot be hid." Her hill was not as lofty as she had once
fancied it would be; but still she was not on the low and safer level
of the plain. She was honorably famous. She could not stain her honor by
the acknowledgment of dishonor. The chief question, after all, was
whether Roland was alive or dead.

Her colorless face and closed eyes, the expression of unutterable
perplexity and anguish in her knitted brows and quivering lips, filled
Felix with wonder and grief. He had risen from his kneeling posture at
her feet, and now his reverential awe of her yielded to the tender
compassion of a man for a weak and suffering woman. He drew her beloved
head on to his breast, and held her in a firm and loving grasp.

"I would not grieve or pain you for worlds," he said falteringly, "nor
would Alice. I love you better than myself; as much as I love her. We
will talk of it another day, mother."

She pressed close to him, and he felt her arms strained about him, as if
she could not hold him near enough to her. It seemed to him as if she
was striving to draw him into the very heart of her motherhood; but she
knew how deep the gulf was between her and him, and shuddered at her own
loneliness.

"It is losing you, my son," she whispered with her quivering lips.

"No, no," he said eagerly; "it is not losing me, but finding another
child. Don't take a gloomy view of it, mother. I shall be as happy as my
father was with you."

He could not keep himself from thinking of his father, or of speaking of
him. He understood more perfectly now what his father's worship of his
mother had been; the tenderness of a stronger being toward a weaker one,
blended with the chivalrous homage of a generous nature to the one woman
chosen to represent all womanhood. There was a keener trouble to him
to-night, than ever before, in the thought that his mother was a widow.

"Leave me now, Felix," she said, loosing him from her close embrace, and
shutting her eyes from the sight of him. "Do not let any one come to me
again to-night. I must be alone."

But when she was alone it was only to let her thoughts whirl round and
round in one monotonous circle. If Roland was dead, her secret was
safe, and Felix might be happy. If he was not dead, Felix must not marry
Alice Pascal. She had not looked forward to this difficulty. There had
been an unconscious and vague feeling in her heart that her son loved
her too passion