They stood silent for a few moments;—moments which seemed hours to Phebe. The stranger—for who could be so great a stranger as one who had been many years dead?—had advanced only a step or two from the threshold, and paused as if some invisible barrier was set up between them. She had shrunk back, and stood leaning against the wall for the support her trembling limbs needed. It was with a vehement effort that at last she spoke.

"Roland Sefton!" she faltered.

"Yes!" he answered, "I am that most miserable man."

"But you died," she said with quivering lips, "fourteen years ago."

"No, Phebe, no," he replied; "would to God I had died then."

Once more an agony of mingled fear and joy overwhelmed her. This dear voice, so lamentable and hopeless, so well remembered in all its tones, told her that he was still living, whom she had mourned over so many years. But what could this mystery mean? What had he passed through? What was about to happen now? A tumult of thoughts thronged to her brain. But clearest of all came the assurance that he was alive, standing there, desolate, changed, and friendless. She ran to him and clasped his hands in hers; stooping down and kissing them, those hard worn hands, which he left unresistingly in her grasp. These loving, and deferential caresses belonged to the time when she was a humble country girl, and he the friend very far above her.

"Come closer to the fire, your hands are cold, Mr. Roland," she said, speaking in the old long-disused accent of her early days, as she might have spoken to him while she was yet a child. She threw a few logs on the fire, and drew up Canon Pascal's chair to the hearth for him. She felt spell-bound; and as if she had been suddenly thrust back upon those old times.

"I am no longer Roland Sefton," he said, sinking down into the chair; "he died, as you say, many a long year ago. Do not light the lamp, Phebe; let us talk by the firelight."

The flicker of the flames creeping round the dry wood played upon his face, and her eyes were fastened on it. Could this man really be Roland Sefton, or was she being tricked by her fancy? Here was a scarred and wrinkled face, blistered and burnt by the summer's sun, and cut and frost-bitten by the winter's cold; the hair was gray and ragged, and the eyes far sunk in the head met her gaze with a despairing and uneasy glance, as if he shrank from her close scrutiny. His bowed shoulders and hands roughened by toil, and worn-out mechanic's dress, were such a change, 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 and Hilda; and I came over to England in August. I have seen all of you, except Felicita."

"Oh! it was wicked! it was cruel!" sobbed Phebe, shivering. "Your mother died, believing she was going to rejoin you; and I, oh! how I have mourned for you!"

"Have you, Phebe?" he said sorrowfully; "but Felicita has been saved from shame, and has been successful. She is too famous now for me to retrace my steps, and get back into truthfulness. I can find no place for repentance, let me seek it ever so carefully and with tears."

"But you have repented?" she whispered.

"Before God? yes!" he answered, "and I believe He has forgiven me. But there is no way by which I can retrieve the past. I have forfeited everything, and I am now shut out even from the duties of life. What ought I to have done, Phebe? There was this way to save my mother, and my children, and Felicita; and I took it. It has prospered for all of them; they hold a different position in the world this day than they could have done if I had lived."

"In this world, yes!" answered Phebe, with a touch of scorn in her voice; "but cannot you see what you have done for Felicita? Oh! it would have been better for her to have endured the shame of your first sin, than bear such a burden of guilt. And you might have outlived the disgrace. There are Christian people in the world who can forgive sin, even as Christ forgives it. Even my poor father forgave it; and Mr. Clifford, he is repenting now that he did not forgive you; it weighs him down in his old age. It would have been better for you and Felicita if you had borne the penalty of your crime."

"And our children, Phebe?" he said.

"Could not God have made it up to them?" she asked. "Did He make it necessary for you to sin again on their account? Oh! if you had only trusted Him! If you had only waited to see how Christ could turn even the sins of the father into blessings for his children! They have missed you; it may be, I cannot see clearly, they must miss you now all their lives. It would break their hearts to learn all this. Whether they must know it, I cannot tell."

"To what end should they know it?" he said. "Don't you see, Phebe, that the distinction Felicita has won binds us to keep this secret? It cannot be disclosed either to her or to them. I came to tell it to the man who brought me here under a seal of secrecy."

"To Canon Pascal?" she exclaimed.

"Pascal?" he repeated, "ay? I remember him now. It would have been terrible to have told it to him."

"Let me think about it," said Phebe, "it has come too suddenly upon me. There must be something we ought to do, but I cannot see it yet. I must have time to recollect it all. And yet I am afraid to let you go, lest you should disappear again, and all this should seem like a dreadful dream."

"You care for me still, Phebe?" he answered mournfully. "No, I shall not disappear from you; I shall hold fast by you, now you have seen me again. If that poor wretch in hell who lifted up his eyes, being in torments, had caught sight of some pitying angel, who would now and then dip the tip of her finger in water and cool his tongue, would he have disappeared from her vision? Wouldn't he rather have had a horrible dread lest she should disappear? But you will not forsake me, Phebe?"

"Never!" replied Phebe, with an intense and mournful earnestness.

"Then I will go," he said, rising reluctantly to his feet. The deep tones of the Abbey clock were striking for the second time since he had entered Canon Pascal's study, and they had been left in uninterrupted conversation. It was time for him to go; yet it seemed to him as if he had still so much to pour into Phebe's ear, that many hours would not give him time enough. Unconstrained speech had proved a source of ineffable solace and strength to him. He had been dying of thirst, and he had found a spring of living waters. To Phebe, and to her alone, he was still a living man, unless sometimes Felicita thought of him.

"If you are still my friend, knowing all," he said, "I shall no longer despair. When will you see me again?"

"I will come to morning service in the Abbey to-morrow," she answered.