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Updated: June 10, 2025
"Yes, I know it," she whispered. For a minute or two Felicita stood, with her white hands resting on Phebe's shoulders, gazing into her mournful face with keen, questioning eyes. Then, with a rapid flush of crimson, betraying a strong and painful heart-throb, which suffused her face for an instant and left it paler than before, she pressed her lips on the girl's sunburnt forehead.
If Madame goes, she will find no one there." With a quick yet stately gesture of farewell, Felicita turned away, and walked swiftly down the little path, not running, but moving so rapidly that she was soon out of sight.
How vividly he remembered the first moment his eyes had ever beheld her, standing as she did now on these very altar steps, with uplifted eyes and a sweet seriousness on her young face! It was only a poor village church, but it was the most sacred spot in the whole world to him; for there he had met Felicita and received her image into his inmost heart.
It was the thought of her, with this terrible and secret addition to her sorrow, which bore her through the long journey and helped her to meet Felicita with something like calmness. From the bay-window of the lodging-house Mr. Clifford watched Felicita coming slowly and feebly toward the house.
"My dear Felicita," he said, "Felix tells me he had some talk with you last night. What do you think of our young people?" "What does Alice say?" she asked. "Oh, Alice!" he answered in an amused yet tender tone; "she would be of one mind with Felix. There is something beautiful in the innocent, unworldly love of children like these, who are ready to build a nest under any eaves.
"But I cannot tell you how I should feel," answered Phebe, "because I could never do it. It makes me shudder to think of such a thing. No human being could do it." "But if you had thrust the one fellow-creature nearest to you, the one who loved you the most," pursued Felicita, "into sin, down into a deeper gulf than he could have fallen into but for you "
They were still some paces apart, he with his shaggy mountain cap in his hand standing respectfully at a distance, and she, sitting by the low, open hearth with her white, quiet face turned toward him. All the village might have witnessed their interview through the uncurtained windows. Slowly, almost mechanically, Felicita left her seat and advanced toward him with an outstretched hand.
"I am afraid," he went on, "if I asked you to leave your manuscript on approbation, it might be months before our readers could look at it. We have scores, if not hundreds, waiting." "Could you recommend any publisher to me?" asked Felicita. "Why not go again to Price and Gould?" he inquired. "I must get more money than they pay me," she answered ingenuously. The publisher shrugged his shoulders.
Why it was there, or why his mother's coffin was there, he did not ask; he only knew that she was there. "My poor Phebe," said Canon Pascal, as they followed closely behind him, "why did you start homewards? Would it not have been best to bury her at Engelberg, beside her husband? Did not Felicita forgive him, even in her death?"
A few years more or less in Dartmoor Prison would be nothing to him, if at the end of them he saw a home waiting for him to return to it. But he never sought to look at the exterior even of that spot to which he had a right. He made no effort to see Felicita. He stayed till he touched his last shilling.
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