But now that Phil was dead—Phil, who had been so much to him—Phil, whom he loved far better than the cold, unsympathetic elder brother who had died years ago, he felt a bitter sense of loss, and pain, and loneliness, and as he rode slowly home in the gathering twilight of that wintry afternoon, and thought of that bright young life and active mind so suddenly blotted out of existence, if his theory was true, he suddenly cried aloud: “It cannot be; Phil is not gone from me forever. Somewhere we must meet again. Death could only stupefy, not quench, all that vitality. There is something beyond; there is a rallying point, a world where we shall meet those whom we have loved and lost. And Phil is there, and some day I shall find him. Thank God for that hope—thank God there is a hereafter.” CHAPTER XXXVIII. MOURNING FOR PHIL. It was very bitter and deep, and all the more so because the blow had fallen so suddenly, without a note of warning. At the Knoll there was a small and select dinner party the evening the letter came. Some friends from Boston were visiting in the house, and Mrs. Rossiter had invited a few of the villagers to meet them, and in her evening dress of claret velvet, with diamonds in her ears and at her throat, she looked as lovely and almost as young as in her early girlhood when she won the heart of the grave and silent Paul Rossiter. Dinner had been over some little time, and she was standing with her guests in the drawing-room when the fatal letter was brought to her. She saw it was from Madras, and that the handwriting was a stranger’s; and though it was directed to her husband, who immediately after dinner had wandered off to his conservatories, where he spent most of his time, she opened it unhesitatingly, feeling sure that it contained tidings of her son, and feeling, too, with that subtle intuition which so often precedes dreadful news, that the tidings were not good. But she was not prepared to hear that Phil was dead; and when she read that he would never return to her again, she gave one long, agonizing shriek, and dropped upon the floor in a faint so nearly resembling death that for a little while they feared she was really dead. Fortunately the family physician was among the guests, and so relief was immediate, or she might never have returned to consciousness, so terrible was the shock to her nervous system. For hours she passed from one fainting fit into another, and when these were over lay in a kind of semi-stupor, moaning at intervals: “Oh, my boy! my Phil, my darling—dead—gone from me forever—my boy, my boy!”