"There it is," he replied; "she gave her father a faithful promise never to part with it, or I'd have bought it myself. She comes here once a year with Miss Hilda and Mr. Felix, and they stay a week or two; and it's shut up all the rest of the time. I've got the key here if you'd like to look inside at old Dummy's carving." How familiar, yet how different, the interior of the cottage seemed! He knew all these carvings, curious and beautiful, which lined the walls and decorated every article of the old oak furniture. But the hearth was cold, and there was no pleasant disorder about the small house telling its story of daily work. In the deep recess of the window-frame, where the western sun was already shining, stood old Marlowe's copy of a carved crucifix, which he had himself once brought from the Tyrol, and lent to him before finding a place for it in his own home. The sacred head was bowed down so low as to be almost hidden under the shadow of the crown of thorns. At the foot of the cross, in delicately small old English letters, the old man had carved the words, "Come unto me all ye that be weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He remembered pointing out the mistake that he had made to old Marlowe. "I like it best," said the dumb man; "I have often been weary, but not with labor; weary of myself, weary of the world, weary of life, weary of everything but my Phebe. That is what Christ says to me." Jean Merle could see the old man's speaking face again, and the fingers moving less swiftly when spelling out the words to him, than when he was talking to Phebe. Weary! weary! was it not so with him? Could any man on earth be more weary than he was? He loitered back to Riversborough through the cool of the evening, with the pale stars shining dimly in the twilight of the summer sky; pondering, brooding over what he had seen and heard that day. He had already done much of what he had come to England to do; but what next? What was the path he ought to take now? He was in a labyrinth, where there were many false openings leading no-whither; and he had no clue to guide him. All these years he had lain as one dead in the coil he had wound about himself, but now he was living again. There was agony in the life that he had entered into, but it was better than the apathy of his death in life.