is no election scene, what is it, Phebe? Why are all the people gathered here in such excitement?"
"Shall I tell you plainly?" asked Phebe, looking steadily into Felicita's dark, inscrutable eyes.
"Tell me the simple truth," she replied, somewhat haughtily; "if any human being can tell it."
"Then the bank has stopped payment," answered Phebe. "Poor Mr. Acton has been found dead in bed this morning; and Mr. Sefton is gone away, nobody knows where. It is the May fair to-day, and all the people are coming in from the country. There's been a run on the bank till they are forced to stop payment. That is what brings the crowd here."
Felicita dropped the curtain which she had been holding back with her hand, and stepped back a pace or two from the window. But her face scarcely changed; she listened calmly and collectedly, as if Phebe was speaking of some persons she hardly knew.
"My husband will come back immediately," she said. "Is not Mr. Clifford there?"
"Yes," said Phebe.
"Are you telling me all?" asked Felicita.
"No," she answered; "Mr. Clifford says he has been robbed. Securities worth nearly ten thousand pounds are missing. He must have found it out already."
"Who does he suspect?" she asked again imperiously; "he does not dare suspect my husband?"
Phebe replied only by a mute gesture. She had never had any secret to conceal before, and she did not see that she had betrayed herself by the words she had uttered. The deep gloom on her bright young face struck Felicita for the first time.
"Do you think it was Roland?" she asked.
Again the same dumb, hopeless gesture answered the question. Phebe could not bring her lips to shape a word of accusation against him. It was agony to her to feel her idol disgraced and cast down from his high pedestal; yet she had not learned any way of concealing or misrepresenting the truth.
"You know he did it?" said Felicita.
"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.
"Tell nobody else," she murmured; "keep the secret for his sake and mine."
Before Phebe could reply she turned away, and, with a steady, unfaltering step, went back to her study and locked herself in.
CHAPTER VII.
AN INTERRUPTED DAY-DREAM.
Felicita's study was so quiet a room, quite remote from the street, that it was almost a wonder the noise of the crowd had reached her. But this morning there had been a pleasant tumult of excitement in her own brain, which had prevented her from falling into an absorbed reverie, such as she usually indulged in, and rendered her peculiarly susceptible to outward influences. All her senses had been awake to-day.
On her desk lay the two volumes of a new book, handsomely got up, with pages yet uncut as it had come from the publishers. A dozen times she had looked at the title-page, as if unable to convince herself of the reality, and read her own name—Felicita Riversdale Sefton. It was the first time her name as an author had been published, though for the last three years she had from time to time written anonymously for magazines. This was her own book; thought out, written, revised, and completed in her chosen solitude and secrecy. No one knew of it; possibly Roland suspected something, but he had not ventured to make any inquiries, and she had no reason to believe that he even suspected its existence. It was simply altogether her own; no other mind had any part or share in it.
There was something like rapture in her delight. The book was a good book, she was sure of it. She had not succeeded in making it as perfect as her ideal, but she had not signally failed. It did in a fair degree represent her inmost thoughts and fancies. Yet she could not feel quite sure that the two volumes were real, and the letter from the publisher, a friendly and pleasant letter enough, seemed necessary to vouch for them. She read and re-read it. The little room seemed too small and close for her. She opened the window to let in the white daylight, undisguised by the faint green tint of the glass, and she leaned out to breathe the fresh sweet air of the spring morning. Life was very pleasurable to her to-day.
There were golden gleams too upon the future. She would no longer be the unknown wife of a country banker, moving in a narrow sphere, which was altogether painful to her in its provincial philistinism. It was a sphere to which she had descended in girlish ignorance. Her uncle, Lord Riversdale, had been willing to let his portionless niece marry this prosperous young banker, who was madly in love with her, and a little gentle pressure had been brought to bear on the girl of eighteen, who had been placed by her father's death in a position of dependence. Since then a smouldering fire of ambition and of dissatisfaction with her lot had been lurking unsuspected under her cold and self-absorbed manner.
But her thoughts turned with more tenderness than usual toward her husband. She had aroused in him also a restless spirit of ambition, though in him it was for her sake, not his own. He wished to restore her if possible to the position she had sacrificed for him; and Felicita knew it. Her heart beating faster with her success was softened toward him; and tears suffused her dark eyes for an instant as she thought of his astonishment and exultation.
The children were at play in the garden below her, and their merry voices greeted her ear pleasantly. The one human being who really dwelt in her inmost heart was her boy Felix, her first-born child. Hilda was an unnecessary supplement to the page of her maternal love. But for Felix she dreamed day-dreams of extravagant aspiration; no lot on earth seemed too high or too good for him. He was a handsome boy, the very image of her father, the late Lord Riversdale, and now as she gazed down on him, her eyes slightly dewed with tears, he looked up to her window. She kissed her hand to him, and the boy waved his little cap toward her with almost passionate gesticulations of delight. Felix would be a great man some day; this book of hers was a stone in the foundation of his fame as well as of her own.
It was upon this mood of exultation, a rare mood for Felicita, that the cry and roar from the street had broken. With a half-smile at herself, the thought flashed across her mind that it was like a shout of applause and admiration, such as might greet Felix some day when he had proved himself a leader of men. But it aroused her dormant curiosity, and she had condescended to be drawn by it to the window of the drawing-room overlooking Whitefriars Road, in order to ascertain its cause. The crowd filling the street was deeply in earnest, and the aim of those who were fighting their way through it was plainly the bank offices in the floor below her. The sole idea that occurred to her, for she was utterly ignorant of her husband's business, was that some unexpected crisis in the borough had arisen, and its people were coming to Roland Sefton as their leading townsman. When Phebe found her she was quietly studying the crowd and its various features, that she might describe a throng from memory, whenever a need should arise for it.
Felicita regained her luxurious little study, and sat down before her desk, on which the new volumes
