But at this moment her maid came to tell her that the carriage of the English Signori, who were coming to dinner, had just driven into the courtyard, and Rita had to give her skirts a last settling, and to hurry to the drawing-room. And Harry had failed in his tie; he had to take a new one, feeling his hands tremble a little. His mind was in a great ferment. Some months before he had seen the advertisement for Harry Joscelyn, or a certificate of his death, in the _Times_, where he was described as “supposed to have emigrated,” and this of itself had roused no small commotion in him. He was to hear of “something to his advantage.” Harry could not tell what that might be, and if for a moment now and then the temptation came over him to answer the appeal and understand the cause of it, it yielded immediately, not only to the old resentment, but to the new sense of alarm and apprehension with which the idea of breaking up his present life, and disclosing to those who knew him under one name another identity, filled his spirit. It appeared to him that, if he gave up his present standing ground by revealing another, his whole life, so happy, so sweet, so full of natural duty, work, and recompense, would break up and disappear from him. As Isaac Oliver he was at the head of the Consular business, known and named in all its affairs. As Isaac Oliver he was the husband of his wife. All the town knew him under that name, his children bore it. It had become almost dear to him, the name which he had picked up in bitter ridicule, and adopted with a perverse laugh, as he might have stuck a feather in his hat. The sound was familiar now to his ears, he liked it. It was Rita’s name. She called him Harry, as the name of his childhood, which he preferred, and he had been led to admit that the “Harry Joscelyn Isaac Oliver,” with which, for precaution sake, he had signed the register on his marriage, was his full baptismal name. He signed it now H. J. Isaac Oliver, and she was Mrs. Isaac Oliver. He liked it, and had a certain pride in it, as a name that was honest and without stain, and which should never suffer in his hands; and if he cut himself off from it, what would become of him? his identity would be gone. But the appearance of Liddy had made a very great impression on him. When she rose up suddenly, with a little start and cry, at the sound of his name, he had seen in a moment, in imagination, the real Isaac Oliver, shuffling like a crab along the North-country road, and a sense of the incongruity had struck him painfully, bringing a sensation of sudden shame and discomfiture; but in general he was not ashamed of the name to which he had grown familiar, and he felt as if, resuming the other, his pleasant life would all break up and disappear, and he would become another man.