Surely, she thought, the trial was coming to an end.
Felicita reached their lodgings utterly exhausted and worn out.

She was a delicate woman, in no way inured to fatigue, and though she had been insensible to the overstrain of the unbroken journey as she was whirled along railways and passed from station to station, a sense of complete prostration seized upon her as soon as she found herself at home.

Day after day she lay in bed, in a darkened room, unwilling to lift her voice above a whisper, waiting in a kind of torpid dread for the intelligence that she knew must soon come.
She had been at home several days, and still there was no news.

Was it possible, she asked herself, that this unknown traveller, and his calamitous fate, should pass on into perfect oblivion and leave matters as they were before?
For a cloud would hang over her and her children as long as Roland was the object of pursuit.

While he was a fugitive criminal, of interest to the police officers of all countries, there was no security for their future.