ticable to return to England, account plausibly
for his disappearance and the mistake as to identity which had caused a
stranger to be buried in his name, and take up his life again as Roland
Sefton. It was improbable that any searching investigation should be
made into his statements. Who would be interested in doing it? But the
old memories and suspicions would be awakened and strengthened a
hundred-fold by the mystery surrounding his return. No one could compel
him to reveal his secret, he had simply to keep his lips closed in
impenetrable silence. True he would be a suspected man, with a
disgraceful secrecy hanging like a cloud about him. He could not live so
at Riversborough, among his old towns-people, of whom he had once been a
leader. He must find some new sphere and dwell in it, always dreading
the tongue of rumor.

And his son and daughter? How would they regard him if he maintained an
obstinate and ambiguous silence towards them? They were no longer little
children, scarcely separate from their father, seeing through his eyes,
and touching life only through him. They were separate individuals,
living souls, with a personality of their own, the more free from his
influence because of his long absence and supposed death. It was a young
man he must meet in Felix, a critic and a judge like other men; but with
a known interest in the criticism and the judgment he had to pass upon
his father, and less apt to pass it lightly. His son would ponder deeply
over any account he might give of himself. Hilda, too, was at a
sensitive and delicate point of girlhood, when she would inevitably
shrink from any contact with the suspicion and doubt that would surround
this strange return after so many years of disappearance.

Yet how could he let them know the terrible fraud he had committed for
their mother's sake and with her connivance? Felix knew of his other
defalcations; but Hilda was still ignorant of them. If he returned to
them with the truth in his lips, they would lose the happy memory of
their mother and their pride in her fame. He understood only too well
how dominant must have been her influence over them, not merely by the
tender common ties of motherhood, but by the fascinating charm of her
whole nature, reserved and stately as it had been. He must betray her
and lessen her memory in their sorrowful esteem. To them, if not to the
world, he must disclose all, or resolve to remain a stranger to them
forever. During