“It seems like the end of the world to me to-night,” thought Mr. Tredethlyn; “and yet once it was comfortable and home-like enough, when I sat with Susy of a night by the fire in the kitchen, while she darned the old man’s gray worsted stockings. And to think that he had such oceans of money all that time, and yet seemed almost to grudge his only child every gown she wore, and every bit of bread she put into her mouth.” The young man was close to the familiar threshold by this time. He knocked at a low, narrow door in the neighbourhood of the one dimly lighted window, and then drew back a few paces, looking up at the old-fashioned casements. “This is the window of Susy’s room,” he thought. “How black and dark it looks to-night! I remember coming up here the night before I ran away to Falmouth to enlist. I remember standing by the low wall yonder, in the cold autumn night, looking up at that very window. There was a light burning then, and I thought of how I should see it burning just the same when I came back, and how I’d throw a handful of earth up at the old window, and Susy would look out, startled and wondering, to find her faithful sweetheart come back to her from the end of the world. And now it’s this place that seems like the end of the world somehow, and I’m every bit as far from Susy now as ever I was out yonder.” The door was opened only a very little way, and a woman’s face, so hard and angular that it seemed almost to cut into the dusky atmosphere, peered out at the traveller. “What do you please to want, sir?” she asked, suspiciously. “I want to ask you a few questions, Martha Dryscoll. I’ve come from the Antipodes to ask them.” “Mr. Tredethlyn!” cried the woman, opening the door to its widest extent; “Mr. Francis Tredethlyn come home to his own like a ghost in the night! I make so bold as to bid you welcome, sir. Your uncle’s empty chair stands ready for you. The house seems strange and lonesome without him.” It was not everybody who would have ascribed to Mr. Oliver Tredethlyn the power to enliven any house with the smallest ray of cheerfulness, or brighten any fireside with so much as the faintest glimmer of light. But Martha Dryscoll spoke in all good faith. She had believed in her master, and had worked for him, and pinched for him, and half-starved herself and other people for his sake, throughout five-and-thirty years of the dreariest and hardest life that woman ever endured. He had picked her up, starved and almost dying, upon a high road near one of his outlying farms, and had taken her from field-labour and all its attendant pains, to be his housekeeper and--slave; and she had repaid this favour a thousandfold by a devotion that knew no weariness, and a rigid economy that extended itself to the saving of a grain of salt in the old spindle-legged leaden saltcellars.