Two mourners stood by: a woman and a man. When all was over, when earth had closed over the grave and its contents, the man sat down on a neighbouring gravestone, and looked at that red mound which held his all, with a dreary stolid gaze of misery and woe. Rachel bent over him, and gently laid her hand on his shoulder. "Mr. Jones, you must come!" she said. He made no reply, he did not rise, and when she took his hand to lead him away, he yielded without resistance. She took him to her own house. Kindly and tenderly she led him, like a little child, and a child he seemed to have become, helpless, inert--without will, without power. His own home was a wreck, the prey of creditors, who found but little there, yet sufficient, for their claims were few, to save him from disgrace. Rachel Gray gave him the room where his child once had slept, where he had come in to look at her in her sleep, and fondly bent over her pillow: he burst into tears as he entered it; and those tears relieved him, and did him good. At the end of two days he rallied from his torpor; he awoke, he remembered he was a man born to work, to earn his daily bread, and bear the burden of life. He went out one morning, and looked for employment. Something he found to do; but what it was he told not Rachel. When she gently asked, he shook his head and smiled bitterly. "It don't matter. Miss Gray," he said; "it don't matter." No doubt it was some miserable, poorly paid task. Yet he only spoke the truth, when he said it mattered little. He lived and laboured, like thousands; but he cared not for to-day, and thought not of to-morrow; the Time of Promise and of Hope had for ever departed. What though he should feel want, so long as he could pay his weekly rent to Rachel Gray, he cared not. There is an end to all things; and as for his old age, should he grow old, had he not the parish and the workhouse? And so Richard Jones could drag on through life, of all hopes, save the heavenly hope, forsaken. But Heaven chose to chastise and humble still further, this already chastised and sorely humbled man. He fell ill, and remained for weeks on his sick bed, a burden cast on the slender means of Rachel Gray. In vain he begged and prayed to be sent to the workhouse or some hospital; Rachel would not hear of it. She kept him, she attended on him with all the devotedness of a daughter; between him and her father she divided her time. Earnestly Jones prayed for death: the boon was not granted; he recovered. They sat together and alone one evening in the quiet little parlour-- alone, for Thomas Gray was no one, when there came a knock at the door, and the visitor admitted by Rachel, proved to be Joseph Saunders. "Mr. Jones is within," hesitatingly said Rachel "And I just want to speak to him," briefly replied Saunders, "so that's lucky."