All the burden of his confession was that he had fallen through seeking Felicita's happiness.

For her sake he had longed for more wealth, and speculated in the hope of gaining it, and tampered with the securities intrusted to him in the hope of retrieving losses.
It was for her, and her only, he maintained; and now he had brought infamy and wretchedness and poverty upon her and his innocent children.
"Would to God I could die to-night!" he exclaimed; "my death would save them from some portion of their trouble." Phebe listened to him almost as heart-broken as himself.

In her singularly solitary life, so far apart from ordinary human society, she had never been brought into contact with sin, and its profound, fathomless misery; and now it was the one friend, whom she had loved the longest and the best, who was walking beside her a guilty man, fleeing through the night from all he himself cared for, to seek a refuge from the consequences of his crime in an uncertain exile.

In years afterward it seemed to her as if that night had been rather a terrible dream than a reality.
At length the pale dawn broke, and the utter separation caused by the darkness between them and old Marlowe passed away with it.

He stopped his horse and came to them, turning a gray, despairing face upon Roland Sefton.
"It is time to leave you," he said; "over these fields lies the nearest station, where you can escape from a just punishment.