How did he bear it? This was a question neither his sister nor I could have answered. He had gone out on the night of the discovery, sent forth by that impulse which in great grief urges us to seek spots no eye can haunt, and the calm silence, so soothing to the troubled senses and wounded heart, of our mother nature. He came in the next morning, looking worn and weary, like one who had wandered far, vainly seeking peace. His sister looked at him sadly, and said, in her gentlest tones-- "It is hard. Cornelius." He looked up in her face and replied calmly, "It is, Kate; but there is no sorrow that cannot be crushed and conquered." Pride, stung at having been so deceived, made him shun sympathy, and forbade him to complain. He struggled against his bitter grief in manful spirit. He quietly called me up one morning to the studio, there to resume the sittings for the Stolen Child; in the course of the same week he procured two Gipsy sitters, and gave to work his whole mind, heart, and energies. Yet there were moments when his hand flagged, when his look became drearily vacant, when it was plain that not even all the might of will could compel attention any longer. There were other signs too which I heeded. A mile down the lane rose a homely little house of God, consecrated to the worship of that faith which, like their country, was only the more dear to Cornelius and Kate for the insults daily heaped upon it. There, Sunday after Sunday, with a brief interruption, I had for three years sat and knelt by the side of Cornelius, and taken a childish pleasure in reading from the same book. But now--and I was quick to notice it--though his hand still held the volume, his eyes no longer perused the page with mine; in his abstracted face I read a worship far more intense, inward, and sorrowful than the quiet attention of old times. Once, as we walked home together, he asked me what the sermon had been about. But nothing endures in this world. The grief of Cornelius was not of a nature to be brooded over for ever: we never knew exactly when he recovered his inward serenity, but that he recovered it, an event which occurred in the course of the winter proved beyond doubt. One afternoon, when both Kate and her brother were out, Mr. Smalley called. He had obtained a living somewhere in the North, and was come to bid us adieu. He expressed much regret that his friend and Miss O'Reilly should not be at home, and inquired after them with his usual benignant gentleness. "They are both quite well; and are you too quite well, Mr. Smalley?" I asked, for as he sat before me, his slender frame slightly bent, I could not but be struck with the pallor and thinness of his face. "I am very well indeed," he replied with a smile, "and in a very happy-- though not, I hope, too elated--frame of mind, which is natural enough considering my recent good fortune. Rugby--have you ever heard of Rugby, my dear?"