Three days: so short a time separated him from the country and the home from which he had been exiled so many years. Any day during those fourteen years he might have started homeward as he was doing now; but there had not been the irresistible hunger in his heart that at this moment drove him thither. He had been vainly seeking to satisfy himself with husks; but even these, dry and empty, and bitter as they were, had failed him. He had lost all; and having lost all, he was coming to himself. There was not the slightest fear of detection in his mind. A gray-haired man with bowed shoulders, and seamed and marred face, who had lost every trace of the fastidiousness, which had verged upon foppery in the handsome and prosperous Roland Sefton, ran no risk of recognition, more especially as Roland Sefton had been reckoned among the dead and buried for many a long year. The lineaments of the dead die with them, however cunningly the artist may have used his skill to preserve them. The face is gone, and the memory of it. Some hearts may long to keep it engraven sharp and clear in their remembrance; but oh, when the "inward eye" comes to look for it how dull and blurred it lies there, like a forgotten photograph which has grown faded and stained in some seldom-visited cabinet! Jean Merle travelled, as a man of his class would travel, in a third-class wagon and a slow train; but he kept on, stopping nowhere for rest, and advancing as rapidly as he could, until on the third day, in the gray of the evening, he saw the chalk-line of the English coast rising against the faint yellow light of the sunset; and as night fell his feet once more trod upon his native soil. So far he had been simply yielding to his blind and irresistible longing to get back to England, and nearer to his unknown children. He had heard so little of them from Alice Pascal, that he could no longer rest without knowing more. How to carry out his intention he did not know, and he had hardly given it a thought. But now, as he strolled slowly along the flat and sandy shore for an hour or two, with the darkness hiding both sea and land from him, except the spot on which he stood, he began to consider what steps he must take to learn what he wanted to know, and to see their happiness afar off without in any way endangering it. He had purchased it at too heavy a price to be willing to place it in any peril now.