It was a year since she had been here last, with Hilda in her first grief for her mother's death; and everywhere she found traces of Jean Merle's handiwork. The half-shaped blocks of wood, left unfinished for years in her father's workshop, were completed. The hawk hovering over its prey, which the dumb old wood-carver had begun as a symbol of the feeling of vengeance he could not give utterance to when brooding over Roland Sefton's crime, had been brought to a marvellous perfection by Jean Merle's practised hand, and it had been placed by him under the crucifix which old Marlowe had fastened in the window-frame, where the last rays of daylight fell upon the bowed head hidden by the crown of thorns. The first night that Phebe sat alone, on the old hearth, her eyes rested upon these until the daylight faded away, and the darkness shut them out from her sight. Had Jean Merle known what he did when he laid this emblem of vengeance beneath this symbol of perfect love and sacrifice? But after a few days, when she had visited every place of yearly pilgrimage, knitting up the slackened threads of memory, Phebe began to realize the terrible solitude of this isolated home of hers. To live again where no step passed by and no voice spoke to her, where not even the smoke of a household hearth floated up into the sky, was intolerable to her genial nature, which was only satisfied in helpful and pleasant human intercourse. The utter silence became irksome to her, as it had been in her girlhood; but even then she had possessed the companionship of her dumb father: now there was not only silence, but utter loneliness.