There was no peace for him, either in the high Alps or the most secluded valleys.
How could there be peace while memory and conscience were gnawing at his heart?
In a dreary round his thoughts went back to the first beginnings of the road that had led him hither; with that vague feeling which all of us have when retracing the irrevocable past, as if by some mighty effort of our will we could place ourselves at the starting-point again and run our race--oh, how differently! Roland could almost fix the date when he had first wished that Mr.
Clifford's bonds, bequeathed to him, were already his own.

He recollected the very day when old Marlowe had asked him to invest his money for him in some safe manner for Phebe's benefit, and how he had persuaded himself that nothing could be safer than to use it for his own purposes, and to pay a higher interest than the old man could get elsewhere.

What he had done for him had been still easier to do for other clients--ignorant men and women who knew nothing of business, and left it all to him, gratefully pleased with the good interest he paid them.

The web had been woven with almost invisible threads at the first, but the finest thread among them was a heavy cable now.
But the one thought that haunted him, never leaving him for an instant in these terrible solitudes, was the thought of Felicita.

His mother he could forget sometimes, or remember her with a dewy tenderness at his heart, as if he could feel her pitiful love clinging to him still; and his children he dreamed of at times in a day-dream, as playing merrily without him, in the blissful ignorance of childhood.