“William!” he said at last, gently; “William!” and the tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks; “my son!” but that son was gone--the old man listened for reply--none came. “He has left me--poor William!--we shall never meet again;” and he sank once more on the old tombstone, dumb, rigid, motionless--an image of Time himself in his own domain of Graves. The dog crept closer to his master, and licked his hand. Philip stood for a moment in thoughtful silence: his exclamation of despair had been answered as by his better angel. There was a being more miserable than himself; and the Accursed would have envied the Bereaved! The twilight had closed in; the earliest star--the star of Memory and Love, the Hesperus hymned by every poet since the world began--was fair in the arch of heaven, as Philip quitted the spot, with a spirit more reconciled to the future, more softened, chastened, attuned to gentle and pious thoughts than perhaps ever yet had made his soul dominant over the deep and dark tide of his gloomy passions. He went thence to a neighbouring sculptor, and paid beforehand for a plain tablet to be placed above the grave he had left. He had just quitted that shop, in the same street, not many doors removed from the house in which his mother had breathed her last. He was pausing by a crossing, irresolute whether to repair at once to the home assigned to Sidney, or to seek some shelter in town for that night, when three men who were on the opposite side of the way suddenly caught sight of him. “There he is--there he is! Stop, sir!--stop!” Philip heard these words, looked up, and recognised the voice and the person of Mr. Plaskwith; the bookseller was accompanied by Mr. Plimmins, and a sturdy, ill-favoured stranger. A nameless feeling of fear, rage, and disgust seized the unhappy boy, and at the same moment a ragged vagabond whispered to him, “Stump it, my cove; that’s a Bow Street runner.” Then there shot through Philip’s mind the recollection of the money he had seized, though but to dash away; was he now--he, still to his own conviction, the heir of an ancient and spotless name--to be hunted as a thief; or, at the best, what right over his person and his liberty had he given to his taskmaster? Ignorant of the law--the law only seemed to him, as it ever does to the ignorant and the friendless--a Foe. Quicker than lightning these thoughts, which it takes so many words to describe, flashed through the storm and darkness of his breast; and at the very instant that Mr. Plimmins had laid hands on his shoulder his resolution was formed. The instinct of self beat loud at his heart. With a bound--a spring that sent Mr. Plimmins sprawling in the kennel, he darted across the road, and fled down an opposite lane.