Reaching the public house where he had left Jack, Geoffrey quietly drew Margery into the small parlor, where he made her lay aside her bonnet and cloak, put her into a comfortable rocker to rest, and then went out to break the glad tidings of her existence and return to her husband. He found him sitting alone on the porch outside the bar-room—nothing ever tempted him inside such a place nowadays—looking wistfully out toward the east, where the full August moon was just rising above the horizon in all its splendor. “Well, Jack, has the time seemed very long to you?” Geoffrey asked, in a cheerful tone, as he sat down beside him. “It has, sir; I’ve had hard work to wait. I’ve a strange hankerin’ after the old home to-night. If I could only wake up and find I’d been dreamin’ all these years, and the old place just as it was, with my girl waitin’ at the door for me, I’d almost be willin’ to give up my hope o’ heaven. But when I think it’s only an empty house—a cold hearth-stone, and—a grave somewhere nigh, that I’m goin’ to find, I feel a’most like givin’ up the battle.” The man’s head sank upon his breast in a disconsolate way, while it seemed as if he had no heart to ask Geoffrey anything about the trip from which he had just returned. The young man waited a few moments, hoping he would question him; but as he still remained absorbed in his own sad thoughts, he at length remarked: “Well, Jack, I found Farmer Bruce.” “Ay! then he’s alive yet; he must be nigh on to sixty,” the man replied, looking up now with a gleam of interest. “I should judge him to be about that; but he’s hale and hearty, and seems like a very kind-hearted man, too.” “A better never lived!” Jack affirmed; “many’s the good turn he and his wife has done me, and—ah!——” A shiver completed the sentence, as if those by-gone days were too painful to dwell upon. Geoffrey pitied the poor fellow from the depths of his heart, and yet he hardly knew where to begin, or how to break his good news to him. “Shall I tell you what Mr. Bruce told me, Jack?” he at length asked. The man nodded, and, by the light of the moon, his companion saw a gray pallor settle over his face, which seemed to have grown almost rigid in its outlines. Geoffrey began by telling him how Mrs. Bruce had gone over to borrow some tea of Mrs. Henly, the day following Jack’s flight; how she knocked and there came no response, when she stepped into the kitchen and found Margery lying on the floor, and becoming so frightened at the sight, she had turned and fled back to her home, with hardly more than a glance at the prostrate woman. “Farmer Bruce,” he went on, “at once went back to your house, taking his son and a hired man with him. They lifted Margery and laid her on her bed, and then John Bruce rode off with all his might after a doctor——” “Doctor! What could they want of a doctor?—a coroner, ye mean,” interrupted Jack, in a thick, hoarse voice.