Two courses were open to him. There was no longer any reason to dread a public trial and conviction for the crime he had committed so many years ago. It was quite practicable 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.