and
parsimonious hoarding had been abruptly broken up by the loss of all he
had toiled for and hoarded up, and the shock had driven him out like a
maniac, to wander about the desolate heights of Engelberg in a mood
bordering on despair, which had made him utterly reckless of his life.
Since then news had come to him from home--stray gleams from the
Paradise he had forfeited. Strongest of them all was the thought that
these fourteen years had transformed his little son Felix into a man,
loving as he himself had loved, and already called to take his part in
the battle of life. He had never realized this before, and it stirred
his heart to the very depths. His children had been but soft, vague
memories to him; it was Felicita who had engrossed all his thought. All
at once he comprehended that he was a father, the father of a son and
daughter, who had their own separate life and career. A deep and
poignant interest in these beings took possession of him. He had called
them into existence; they belonged to him by a tie which nothing on
earth, in heaven, or in hell itself could destroy. As long as they lived
there must be an indestructible interest for him in this world. Felicita
was no longer the first in his thoughts.

The dim veil which time had drawn around them was rent asunder, and they
stood before him bathed in light, but placed on the other side of a gulf
as fathomless, as impassable, and as death-like as the ice-crevasses
yawning at his feet. He gazed down into the cold, gleaming abyss, and
across it to the sharp and slippery margin where there could be no
foot-hold, and he pictured to himself the springing across that horrible
gulf to reach them on the other side, and the falling, with outstretched
hands and clutching fingers, into the unseen icy depths below him. For
the first time in his life he shrank back shivering and terror-stricken
from the edge of the crevasse, with palsied limbs and treacherous
nerves. He felt that he must get back into safer standing-ground than
this solitary and perilous glacier.

He reached at last a point of safety, where he could lie down and let
his trembling limbs rest awhile. The whole slope of the valley lay below
him, with its rich meadows of emerald green, and its silvery streams
wandering through them. Little farms and chalets were dotted about, some
of them clinging to the sides of the rocks opposite to him, or resting
on the very edge of precipices thousands of feet deep, a