orse fraud! If he had managed so as
to bury some one else in his name, and go on living under a false one!
Could you forgive that?"

"If Roland could come back a repentant man, I would forgive him every
sin," answered Mr. Clifford, "and rejoice that I had not driven him to
seek death. But what do you mean, Phebe? why do you ask?"

"Because," she answered, speaking almost in a whisper, with her face
close to his, "Roland did not die. That man, who was here in August, and
called himself Jean Merle, is Roland himself. He saw you, and all of us,
and did not dare to make himself known. I can tell you all about it.
But, oh! he has bitterly repented; and there is no place of repentance
for him in this world. He cannot come back amongst us, and be Roland
Sefton again."

"Where is he?" asked the old man, trembling.

"He is here; he came with me. I will go and fetch him," she answered.

Mr. Clifford leaned back in his arm-chair, and gazed towards the
half-open door. His memory had gone back twenty years, to the last time
he had seen Roland Sefton, in the prime of his youth, handsome, erect,
and happy, who had made his heart ache as he thought of his own
abandoned son, lying buried in a common grave in Paris. The man whom he
saw entering slowly and reluctantly into the room behind Phebe, was
gray-headed, bent, and abject. This man paused just within the doorway,
looking not at him but round the room, with a glance full of grief and
remembrance. The eager, questioning eyes of old Mr. Clifford did not
arrest his attention, or divert it from the aspect of the old familiar
place.

"No, no, Phebe!" exclaimed Mr. Clifford, "he's an impostor, my dear.
That's not my old friend's son Roland."

"Would to God I were not!" cried Jean Merle bitterly, "would to God I
stood in this room as a stranger! Phebe Marlowe, this is very hard; my
punishment is greater than I can bear. All my life comes back to me
here. This place, of all other places in the world, brings my sin and
folly to remembrance."

He sank down on a chair, and buried his face in his hands, to shut out
the hateful sight of the old home. He was inside his Paradise again; and
behold, it was a place of torment. There was no room in his thoughts for
Mr. Clifford, it was nothing to him that he should be called an
impostor. He came to claim nothing, not even his own name. But the
avenging memories of the past claimed him and held him fast bound. Even
last night, when in the chi