"Sir, you wrong me: for more than twenty years I have maintained myself-- no matter how, but without taxing you;--and now, I felt remorse for having suffered you to discard me,--now, when you are old and helpless, and, I heard, blind: and you might want aid, even from your poor good- for-nothing son. But I have done. Forget,--not my sins, but this interview. Repeal your curse, father; I have enough on my head without yours; and so--let the son at least bless the father who curses him. Farewell!" The speaker turned as he thus said, with a voice that trembled at the close, and brushed rapidly by Philip, whom he did not, however, appear to perceive; but Philip, by the last red beam of the sun, saw again that marked storm-beaten face which it was difficult, once seen, to forget, and recognised the stranger on whose breast be had slept the night of his fatal visit to R----. The old man's imperfect vision did not detect the departure of his son, but his face changed and softened as the latter strode silently through the rank grass. "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."