efore, even in those palmy days when it was no
unthought-of honor that he might some day take his place in the House
of Commons. He called himself Jean Merle, for no other name belonged to
him; but he felt himself to be an Englishman again, to whom the life of
a Swiss peasant would be a purgatory.

Other natural instincts were asserting themselves. He had been a man of
genial, social habits, glad to gather round him smiling faces and
friendly voices; and this bias of his was stirring into life and shaking
off its long stupor. He longed, with intense longing, for some mortal
ear into which he could pour the story of his sins and sufferings, and
for some human tongue to utter friendly words of counsel to him. It was
not enough to pour out his confessions before God in agonizing prayer;
that he had done, and was doing daily. But it was not all. The natural
yearning for man's forgiveness, spoken in living human speech, grew
stronger within him. There was no longer a chance for him to make even a
partial reparation of the wrong he had committed; he felt himself
without courage to begin the long conflict again. What his soul hungered
for now was to see his life through another man's eyes.

But his money, economize it as he might, was slowly melting away. Unless
he could get work--and all his efforts to find it failed--it would not
do to remain in England. At Engelberg had secured a position as a wood
carver, and his livelihood was assured. There, too, he possessed a
scanty knowledge of the neighbors, and they of him. It would be his
wisest course to return there, to forget what he had been, and to draw
nearer to him the simple and ignorant people, who might yet be won over
to regard him with good-will. This must be done before he found himself
penniless as well as friendless. He set aside a certain sum, when that
was spent he must once more be an exile.

Until then, it was his life to pace to and fro along the streets of
London. Somewhere in this vast labyrinth there was a home to which he
had a right; a hearth where he could plant himself and claim it for his
own. He was master of it, and of a wife, and children; he, the lonely,
almost penniless man. It would be a small thing to him to pay the
penalty the law could demand of him. A few years more or less in
Dartmoor Prison would be nothing to him, if at the end of them he saw a
home waiting for him to return to it. But he never sought to look at the
exterior even of that s