e panic had been caused by the vague
rumor afloat of some mysterious complicity in crime between the absent
partner and the clerk who had committed suicide. It was, therefore,
considered necessary for the prosperous re-establishment of the bank to
put forth a cautiously worded circular, in which Mr. Clifford's return
was made the reason for the absence on a long journey of Roland Sefton,
whose disappearance had to be accounted for. By the time he was arrested
and brought to trial the confidence of the bank's customers in its
stability would in some measure be regained.

There was thus a good deal of conjecture and of contradictory opinion
abroad in Riversborough concerning Roland Sefton, which continued to be
the town's-talk for some weeks. Even Madame began to believe in a
half-bewildered manner that her son had gone on a journey of business
connected with the bank, though she could not account for his total
silence. Sometimes she wondered if he and Felicita could have had some
fatal quarrel, which had driven him away from home in a paroxysm of
passionate disappointment and bitterness. Felicita's coldness and
indifference might have done it. With this thought, and the hope of his
return some day, she turned for relief to the discharge of her household
duties, and to the companionship of the children, who knew nothing
except that their father was gone away on a journey, and might come back
any day.

Neither Madame nor the children knew that whenever they left the house
they were followed by a detective, and every movement was closely
watched. But Felicita was conscious of it by some delicate sensitiveness
of her imaginative temperament. She refused to quit the house except in
the evening, when she rambled about the garden, and felt the fresh air
from the river breathing against her often aching temples. Even then she
fancied an eye upon her--an unsleeping, unblinking eye; the unwearying
vigilance of justice on the watch for a criminal. Night and day she felt
herself living under its stony gaze.

It was a positive pain to her when reviews of her book appeared in
various papers, and were forwarded to her with congratulatory letters
from her publishers. She was living far enough from London to be easily
persuaded, without much vanity, that her name was upon everybody's lips
there. She read the reviews, but with a sick heart, and the words were
forgotten as soon as she put them away; but the Riversborough papers,
which h