provided for. They own the place at Hatboro'; he
deeded it to them long before his crookedness is known to have begun;
and his creditors couldn't touch it if they wished to. If he had really
that fatherly affection for them, which he appeals to in others, he
wouldn't have left them in doubt whether he was alive or dead for four
or five months, and then dragged them into an open letter asking
forbearance in their name, and promising, for their sake, to right those
he had wronged. The thing is thoroughly indecent."

Since the fact of Northwick's survival had been established beyond
question by the publication of his letter, Hilary's mind in regard to
him had undergone a great revulsion. It relieved itself with a sharp
rebound from the oppressive sense of responsibility for his death, which
he seemed to have incurred in telling Northwick that the best thing for
him would be a railroad accident. Now that the man was not killed,
Hilary could freely declare, "He made a great mistake in not getting out
of the world, as many of us believed he had; I confess I had rather got
to believe it myself. But he ought at least to have had the grace to
remain dead to the poor creatures he had dishonored till he could repay
the people he had defrauded."

"Ah! I don't know about that," said Sewell.

"No? Why not?"

"Because it would be a kind of romantic deceit that he'd better not keep
up."

"He seems to have kept it up for the last four or five months," said
Hilary.

"That's no reason he should continue to keep it up," Sewell persisted.
"Perhaps he never knew of the rumor of his death."

"Ah, that isn't imaginable. There isn't a hole or corner left where the
newspapers don't penetrate, nowadays."

"Not in Boston. But if he were in hiding in some little French village
down the St. Lawrence--"

"Isn't that as romantic as the other notion, parson?" crowed old Corey.

"No, I don't think so," said the minister. "The cases are quite
different. He might have a morbid shrinking from his own past, and the
wish to hide from it as far as he could; that would be natural; but to
leave his children to believe a rumor of his death in order to save
their feelings, would be against nature; it would be purely histrionic;
a motive from the theatre; that is, perfectly false."

"Pretty hard on Hilary, who invented it," Bellingham suggested; and they
all laughed.

"I don't know," said Hilary. "The man seems to be posing in other ways.
You would