“But he won’t annoy his daughter. Did you hear what he said to the child, up there by the lilac bushes?” And then they all chattered, each striving to give his or her own views of the situation, till a sudden vigorous “Hush!” brought them all to an abrupt standstill and set them staring at the doctor with wide-open eyes and mouths. “You are all acting like children!” protested that gentleman, with his white face raised and his eyes burning fiercely upon them. “I say that man is an impostor! Why should Ephraim Earle come back?” “And why shouldn’t he?” asked another. “Answer us that, Dr. Izard. Why shouldn’t the man come back?” “True, true! Hasn’t he a daughter here?” “With money of her own. Just the same amount as he once ran off with.” “I tell you again to be quiet.” It was still the doctor who was talking. “If you are daft yourselves, do not try to make other people so! Where is this fellow? I will soon show you he is not the man you take him to be.” “I don’t know how you will do it,” objected one, as the group fell back before the doctor’s advancing figure. “He’s as like him as one pea is like another, and he remembers all of us and even chattered with Mother Jessup about her famous worsted socks.” “Fools!” came from beneath the doctor’s set lips as he strode from the door and passed rapidly into the highway. “Here, you!” he cried, accosting the man who was the centre of a group some rods away, “come up here! I want to speak to you.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XI. FACE TO FACE. THE stranger, thus hailed, turned as the doctor’s voice rang down the road, and acknowledging the somewhat rough summons with a bow of mock affability, stepped obligingly up the hill. The neighbors who had flocked into the street to watch the meeting, saw the doctor’s lip curl as the wretched figure advanced. This man, Ephraim Earle? Why had he called these credulous creatures fools? They were simply madmen. But in another moment his countenance changed. The miserable fellow had paused and was standing a few feet off with what could not be called other than a look of old comradeship. He spoke first also and with quite a hearty ring to his naturally strident voice. “Well, Oswald, old boy, this is a pleasure! Now don’t say you don’t remember me—” for the doctor had started back with an irrepressible gesture of disgust that to some eyes was not without its element of confusion, “I know I am changed, but no more so than you are, if you have led a more respectable life than I.” “Scoundrel!” leaped from Dr. Izard’s white lips. “How dare you address me as if we were, or ever had been, friends! You are a brazen adventurer, and I—” “And you are the perfectly irreproachable physician with a well-earned fame, and a past as free from shadow as—well, as your face is free from surprise at this unexpected return of one you probably thought dead.”