to know from her.

He was careful to take the precaution of exchanging his foreign garb of
a Swiss peasant for the dress of an English mechanic. The change did not
make him look any more like his old self, for there was no longer any
incongruity in his appearance. No soul on earth knew that he had not
died many years ago, except Felicita. He might saunter down the streets
of his native town in broad daylight on a market-day, and not a
suspicion would cross any brain that here was their old townsman, Roland
Sefton, the fraudulent banker.

Yet he timed his journey so as not to reach Riversborough before the
evening of the next day; and it was growing dusk when he paced once more
the familiar streets, slowly, and at every step gathering up some sharp
reminiscence of the past. How little were they changed! The old
grammar-school, with its gray walls and mullioned windows, looked
exactly as it had done when he was yet a boy wearing his college-cap and
carrying his satchel of school-books. His name, he knew, was painted in
gold on a black tablet on the walls inside as a scholar who had gained
a scholarship. Most of the shops on each side of the streets bore the
same names and looked but little altered. In the churchyard the same
grave-stones were standing as they stood when he, as a child, spelt out
their inscriptions through the open railings which separated them from
the causeway. There was a zigzag crack in one of the flag-stones, which
was one of his earliest recollections; he stood and put his clumsy boot
upon it as he had often placed his little foot in those childish years,
and leaning his head against the railings of the churchyard, where all
his English forefathers for many a generation were buried, he waited as
if for some voice to speak to him.

Suddenly the bells in the dark tower above him rang out a peal, clanging
and clashing noisily together as if to give him a welcome. They had rung
so the day he brought Felicita home after their long wedding journey. It
was Friday night, the night when the ringers had always been used to
practise, in the days when he was churchwarden. The pain of hearing them
was intolerable; he could bear no more that night. Not daring to go on
and look at the house where he was born, and where his children had been
born, but which he could never more enter, he sought out a quiet inn,
and shut himself up in a garret there to think, and at last to sleep.

CHAPTER XII.

A GLIMPSE