With this heavenly music in his ears and this seeming peace and happiness before his eyes, Lynn Gordon could hear no sound of the sorrow of living, nor could he see any sign of the pain of the world. An unconscious smile even lifted for a moment the weight from his heart as he idly watched a merry couple of nuthatches, those gay "clowns of the green tent of the woods," tumbling up and down a giant elm. He did not see the solitary butcher bird, nature's most cruel executioner, sitting in motionless, sinister silence in the dark depths of a great thorn tree, nature's cruelest scaffold. As the light grew brighter the young man's eyes followed the wood smoke arising from the tall chimney of the tavern in slender, thin spirals of pale blue, and going straight up to the bluer blue of the warm, windless sky. With the sight, the deep sadness of the night came back suddenly and overwhelmingly. It was not a terrible dream; it was a more terrible reality. Under that old mossy roof, so simple, so peaceful-seeming, lay all that was mortal of the noblest presence, the noblest mind, the noblest heart that this isolated corner of the earth had ever given to the greater world. Before a tragedy so overwhelming every earnest soul striving in Oldfield stood awed, although it was not given to many to comprehend that the greatest awe which even the simplest felt was for the awful Mystery of Life. Never in the history of the village had its simple people been so slow in taking up the petty burden of daily struggle and strife. It seemed as if the least imaginative must be feeling the littleness of all earthly things. Even old lady Gordon's look and manner were almost gentle, certainly more gentle than her grandson had ever seen them. Scarcely a word passed between the two after bidding each other good morning on meeting at the breakfast table; and she saw him go in silence when the uneaten meal was over. He hastened straight up the road, looking neither to the right nor the left. Doris was with Miss Judy; he knew that she was, because he had haunted the house through the greater part of the terrible night, and, although he had not been able to speak to her, he had seen her shadow on the white curtain of Miss Judy's room. The sight had comforted him somewhat at the moment, but he now was longing more than ever to see her, to speak to her--longing with the unspeakably softened tenderness that comes to love through grief.