ad been very guarded in their statements about the death of Acton
and the events at the Old Bank, took up the book with what appeared to
her fulsome and offensive enthusiasm. It had never occurred to her that
local criticism was certain to follow the appearance of a local writer;
and she shrank from it with morbid and exaggerated disgust. Even if all
had been well, if Roland had been beside her, their notices would have
been well-nigh intolerable to her. She could not have endured being
stared at and pointed out in the streets of her own little town. But now
Fame had come to her with broken wings and a cracked trumpet, and she
shuddered at the sound of her own name harshly proclaimed through it.

It soon became evident that Roland Sefton had succeeded in getting away
out of the country. The police were at fault; and as no one in his own
home knew how to communicate with him, no clew had been discovered by
close surveillance of their movements. Such vigilance could be kept up
only for a few months at longest, and as the summer drew toward the end
it ceased.

CHAPTER IX.

FAST BOUND.

Roland Sefton had met with but few difficulties in getting clear away
out of England, and there was little chance of his being identified,
from description merely, by any of the foreign police, or by any English
detective on the Continent who was not as familiar with his personal
appearance as the Riversborough force were. In his boyhood he had spent
many months, years even, in his mother's native village with her father,
M. Roland Merle, the pastor of a parish among the Jura Mountains. It was
as easy for him to assume the character of a Swiss mountaineer as to
sustain that of a prosperous English banker. The dress, the patois, the
habits of the peasant were all familiar to him, and his disguise in them
was as complete as disguise ever can be. The keen eye either of love or
hate can pierce through all disguises.

Switzerland was all fatherland to him, as much so as his native country,
and the county in which Riversborough was situated. There was no
ignorance in him of any little town, or the least known of the Alps,
which might betray the stranger. He would never need to attract notice
by asking a question. He had become a member of an Alpine club as soon
as his boyish thews and sinews were strong enough for stiff and perilous
climbing. He had crossed the most difficult passes and scaled some of
the worst peaks. And there had be