can help me to put into execution, Phebe. I have
an intolerable dread of losing sight of you all again; let me be at
least somewhere in England, when you can now and then give me tidings of
my children and Felicita."

"I will do anything in the world to help you," cried Phebe eagerly.

"Then let me go to your little farm," he answered, "and take up your
father's life, at least for a time, until I can see how to make myself
of greater use to my fellow-men. I will till the fields as he did, and
finish the carvings he has left undone, and live his simple, silent
life. It will be good for me, and I shall not be banished from my own
country. I shall be a happier man then than I have any right to be."

"Have you no fear of being recognized?" she asked.

"None," he replied. "Look at me, Phebe. Should you have known me again
if I had not betrayed myself to you?"

"I should have known you again anywhere," she exclaimed. But it was her
heart that cried out that no change could have concealed him from her;
there was a dread lying deep down in her conscience that she might have
passed him by with no suspicion. He shook his head in answer to her
assertion.

"I will go out into the town," he continued, "and speak to half-a-dozen
men who knew me best, and there will be no gleam of recognition in their
eyes. Recollect Roland Sefton is dead, and has been dead so long that
there will be no clear memory left of him as he was then to compare with
me. And any dim resemblance to him will be fully accounted for by my
relationship to Madame Sefton. No, I am not afraid of the keenest eyes."

He went out as he had said, and met his old townsmen, many of whom were
themselves so changed that he could barely recognize them. The memory of
Roland Sefton was blotted out, he was utterly forgotten as a dead man
out of mind.

As Jean Merle strayed through the streets crowded with market-people
come in from the country, his new scheme grew stronger and brighter to
him. It would keep him in England, within reach of all he had loved and
had lost. The little place was dear to him, and the laborious, secluded
peasant life had a charm for him who had so long lived as a Swiss
peasant. By-and-by, he thought, the chance resemblance in the names
would merge that of Merle into the more familiar name of Marlowe; and
the identity of his pursuits with those of the deaf and dumb old man
would hasten such a change. So the years to come would pass by in labor
a