But days went by without Joan coming back, and Eve, who was left behind to look after Uncle Zebedee, had to sit and listen to the terrible outpourings of wrath against his son to which the old man gave vent in the presence of his neighbors, and see the more heartrending desolation of spirit which bowed him to the ground when no strange eye was near to witness his weight of woe. So entirely had the chain of circumstances overpowered Eve that this climax of disaster seemed to have sealed up the flow of her emotions, and listening to and looking at the tears, exclamations, sighs and groans with which the excitable, sympathetic Cornish folk expressed their anguish and their indignation, she asked herself, "Had all feeling left her? Did she no longer care what happened to herself or anybody around her? Was it nothing to her that her life was, as it were, at an end, her future blighted, her hopes dead, her lover disgraced, reviled, disowned and denounced by his own father and his own family?" Any way, she could find no tears to bewail her sad fate in, no sighs to relieve her burdened heart, no groans to ease her desolate spirit: all was chaos, over which two dark shadows moved--the spectral forms of herself and Adam. "Uncle, what do you think's become of him? where can he have gone to?" Eve asked one night as, no longer afraid of his neighbors seeing him, the old man tore off the armor under which in their presence he concealed every softer feeling. "To bottom o' sae, clane gone out o' the warld, I hope, where I wishes I was too," groaned Zebedee. "Awh! to think e'er a boy o' mine should ha' sarved us so!--that he us counted 'bove all other flesh and blood should ha' bin the whiles carryin' 'bout the heart of a fausse Judas in his body!" "Perhaps he was mad," said Eve, dropping her voice in terror of the suggestion. "Lord send I could see un ravin'!" cried Zebedee. "Why," he added, his voice breaking under the pictured joy, "I'd thraw mysel' 'pon un and hug un to me close, though he tored out my heart 'pon the spot for 't. Naw, lass, naw," he sighed, "he ain't mad: 'tis the devil has seazed hold on un somehow: that's what's brought un to this." "Didn't he say nothing that seems now as if he'd told you that night what he meant to do?" urged Eve. "Naw, nothin'." "And you didn't say anything to him, did you?" "Iss, there 'tis: that's what sticks by me and shaws me plain the vengeance that was in un, 'cos I tawld un that us was tryin' to dale double, so as to manage for Jerrem to stale away." "You didn't tell him about the soldier?" faltered Eve. "No, you couldn't, because you didn't know anything about it yourself, did you?" "Iss, I did. Jerrem tawld--he allays tawld me everything Jerrem did--and I ups and tells Adam." An icy grip seized Eve by the heart. "Oh, uncle!" she groaned, "could it be because of that--that he thought about me?"