When Faber at length returned to Glaston, his friends were shocked at his appearance. Either the hand of the Lord, or the hand of crushing chance, had been heavy upon him. A pale, haggard, worn, enfeebled man, with an eye of suffering, and a look that shrunk from question, he repaired to his desolate house. In the regard of his fellow-townsmen he was as Job appeared to the eyes of his friends; and some of them, who knew no more of religion than the sound of its name, pitied him that he had not the comfort of it. All Glaston was tender to him. He walked feebly, seldom showed the ghost of a smile, and then only from kindness, never from pleasure. His face was now almost as white as that of his lost Juliet. His brother doctors behaved with brotherly truth. They had attended to all his patients, poor as well as rich, and now insisted that he should resume his labors gradually, while they fulfilled his lack. So at first he visited only his patients in the town, for he was unable to ride; and his grand old horse, Ruber, in whom he trusted, and whom he would have ventured sooner to mount than Niger, was gone! For weeks he looked like a man of fifty; and although by degrees the restorative influences of work began to tell upon him, he never recovered the look of his years. Nobody tried to comfort him. Few dared, for very reverence, speak to the man who carried in him such an awful sorrow. Who would be so heartless as counsel him to forget it? and what other counsel was there for one who refused like him? Who could have brought himself to say to him--"There is loveliness yet left, and within thy reach: take the good, etc.; forget the nothing that has been, in the something that may yet for awhile avoid being nothing too; comfort thy heart with a fresh love: the time will come to forget both, in the everlasting tomb of the ancient darkness"? Few men would consent to be comforted in accordance with their professed theories of life; and more than most would Faber, at this period of his suffering, have scorned such truth for comfort. As it was, men gave him a squeeze of the hand, and women a tearful look; but from their sympathy he derived no faintest pleasure, for he knew he deserved nothing that came from heart of tenderness. Not that he had begun to condemn himself for his hardness to the woman who, whatever her fault, yet honored him by confessing it, or to bemoan her hard fate to whom a man had not been a hiding-place from the wind, a covert from the tempest of life, a shadow-shelter from the scorching of her own sin. As he recovered from the double shock, and, his strength slowly returning, his work increased, bringing him again into the run of common life, his sense of desolation increased. As his head ached less, his heart ached the more, nor did the help he ministered to his fellows any longer return in comfort to himself. Hitherto his regard of annihilation had been as of something so distant,