A terrible scene of boyish anguish followed, as they bent over the lifeless brow. But quietly, calmly, Mr Rose checked them, and they knelt down with streaming eyes while he prayed. They rose a little calmer, and as they turned back again and again to take one last fond look at the pale yet placid face, Mr Rose said in a solemn tone-- "For ever with the Lord, Amen so let it be Life from the dead is in that word, And Immortality." VOLUME ONE, CHAPTER FIFTEEN. HOME AGAIN. O far beyond the waters The fickle feet may roam, But they find no light so pure and bright As the one fair star of home; The star of tender hearts, lady, That glows in an English home. That night, when Eric returned to his dormitory, full of grief, and weighed down with the sense of desolation and mystery, the other boys were silent from sympathy in his sorrow. Duncan and Llewellyn both knew and loved Russell themselves, and they were awestruck to hear of his death; they asked some of the particulars, but Eric was not calm enough to tell them that evening. The one sense of infinite loss agitated him, and he indulged his paroxysms of emotion unrestrained, yet silently. Reader, if ever the life has been cut short which you most dearly loved, if ever you have been made to feel absolutely lonely in the world, then, and then only, will you appreciate the depth of his affliction. But, like all affliction, it purified and sanctified. To Eric, as he rested his aching head on a pillow wet with tears, and vainly sought for the sleep whose blessing he had never learned to prize before, how odious seemed all the vice which he had seen and partaken in since he became an inmate of that little room. How his soul revolted with infinite disgust from the language which he had heard, and the open glorying in sin of which he had so often been a witness. The stain and the shame of sin fell heavier than ever on his heart; it rode on his breast like a nightmare; it haunted his fancy with visions of guilty memory, and shapes of horrible regret. The ghosts of buried misdoings, which he had thought long-lost in the mists of recollection, started up menacingly from their forgotten graves, and made him shrink with a sense of their awful reality. Behind him, like a wilderness, lay years which the locust had eaten; the entrusted hours which had passed away, and been reckoned to him as they passed.