that perhaps, she acknowledged it reluctantly to herself, if he
had not spoken as he did she might have passed him by undiscovered.

"I am Jean Merle," he said, "not Roland Sefton."

"Jean Merle?" she repeated in a low, bewildered tone, "not Roland
Sefton, but Jean Merle?"

But she could not be bewildered or in doubt much longer. This was Roland
indeed, the hero of her life, come back to her a broken-down, desolate,
and hopeless man. She knelt down on the hearth beside him, and laid her
hand compassionately on his.

"But you are Roland himself to me!" she cried. "Oh! be quick, and tell
me all about it. Why did we ever think you were dead?"

"It was best for them all," he answered. "God knows I believed it was
best. But it was a second sin, worse than the first, Phebe. I did the
man who died no wrong, for he told me as he lay dying that he had no
friends to grieve for him, and no property to leave. All he wanted was a
decent grave; and he has it, and my name with it. The grave at Engelberg
contains a stranger. And I, Jean Merle, have taken charge of it."

"Oh!" cried Phebe, with a pang of dread, "how will Felicita bear it?"

"Felicita has known it; she consented to it," said Jean Merle. "If she
had uttered one word against my desperate plan, I should have recoiled
from it. To be dead whilst you are yet in the body; to have eyes to see
and ears to hear with, and a thinking brain and a hungry heart, whilst
there is no sign, or sound, or memory, or love from your former life;
you cannot conceive what that is, Phebe. I was dead, yet I was too
keenly alive in Jean Merle, the poor wood-carver and miser. They thought
I was imbecile; and I was almost a madman. I could not tear myself away
from the grave where Roland Sefton was buried; but oh! what I have
suffered!"

He ended with a long shuddering sigh, which pierced Phebe to the heart.
The joy of seeing him again was vanishing in the sight of his suffering;
but the thought uppermost in her mind was of Felicita.

"And she has known all along that you were not dead?" she said, in a
tone of awe.

"Yes, Felicita knew," he answered.

"And has she never seen you, never written to you?" she asked.

"She knows nothing of me," he replied. "I was to be dead to her, and to
every one else. We parted forever in Engelberg fourteen years ago this
very month. Perhaps she believes me to be dead in reality. But I could
live no longer without knowing something of you all, of Felix a