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Updated: June 16, 2025
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?
Yet he timed his journey so as not to reach Riversborough before the evening of the next day; and it was growing dusk when he paced once more the familiar streets, slowly, and at every step gathering up some sharp reminiscence of the past. How little were they changed!
But she knew painfully that her name was now a hundred-fold better known than it had been while she was yet only the wife of a Riversborough banker. All her work for the last fourteen years had placed it more and more prominently before the public.
"Don't turn him out," called Felix; "it's a mistake, my men. Let him alone. He never knew my father." The drunkard turned round and confronted him, and the little assembly was quiet again, with an intense quietness, waiting to hear what would follow. "Your father's name was Roland Sefton?" said the drunkard. "Yes," answered Felix. "And he was banker of the Old Bank at Riversborough?" he asked.
Yet, to let her start off alone on this fruitless errand, to find only an empty hut at Engelberg, with no trace of its occupant left behind, was heartless, and might prove equally injurious to Felicita. There was no time to communicate with Riversborough, she must come to a decision for herself, and at once.
But it was in Riversborough that the deepest impression was made, and the keenest curiosity aroused by the story of her death, obscure in some of its details, but full of romantic interest to her old towns-people, who were thus recalled to the circumstances attending Roland Sefton's disappearance and subsequent death.
She read the reviews, but with a sick heart, and the words were forgotten as soon as she put them away; but the Riversborough papers, which had been very guarded in their statements about the death of Acton and the events at the Old Bank, took up the book with what appeared to her fulsome and offensive enthusiasm.
But he could afford this no longer, and the thought of the next winter's work which lay before him and Phebe harassed him terribly. "Father," she said to him one evening, after she had been at Riversborough, "they are all going away Mrs. Sefton, and Madame, and the children. They are going Scarborough, and after that to London, never to come back. I shall not see them again."
Even Phebe Marlowe's correspondence was subject to their vigilance. But not a trace could be discovered. He was gone; whether he had fled to America, or concealed himself nearer home on the Continent, no one could make a guess. Mr. Clifford remained in Riversborough, and resumed his position as head of the firm.
He had purchased it at too heavy a price to be willing to place it in any peril now. That Felicita had left Riversborough he had heard from her own lips, but there was no other place where he was sure of discovering her present abode, for London was too wide a city, even if she had carried out her intention of living there, for him to ascertain where she dwelt.
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