Edgar walked on and on, through the village, over the perfumy common, which lay basking in the intense unbroken sunshine. All the mossy nooks under the gorse bushes were warm as nests which the bird has just quitted--the seedpods were cracking under the heat, all the sweet scents of the wild, mossy, heathery, aromatic bit of heath were coming out--the insects buzzing, every leaf of the vegetation thrilling under the power of the sunshine. He went straight across the common, disregarding the paths, through gorse and juniper bushes, and tufts of bracken, and beds of heather. He did not see and he did not care. The lodge was two miles away along a road which was skirted on either side by the lingering half-reclaimed edges of the heath--and if the walk had been undertaken with the intention of making a survey of the beauties of Arden, it could not have been better chosen. The lodge on the common was just within the enclosure of the park. Its windows commanded the long, purple-green stretch of heath, with the spire of Arden church rising over it in the distance, and a white line of road, on which were few passengers; but the lodge windows were closed that morning. The hot sun beat on them in vain--old eyes which for fifty years had contemplated that same landscape were now closed upon it for ever. John Smith had been growing old when he went to the lodge; he had been there before the old Squire’s time, having known him a boy. He had lived into Edgar’s time, and was proud of his hundred years. “I can’t expect to see e’er another young Squire,” he had said the last time Edgar had seen him. “Don’t you flatter me. Short o’ old Parr, and them folks in the Bible, I don’t know none as has gone far over the hunderd; but I don’t say but what I’d like to see another young Squire.” The words came back into Edgar’s mind as he paused. He knocked softly at the cottage door, and took off his hat when the daughter, herself an old woman, steady and self-possessed, as the poor are in their deepest grief, came to the door. “Will you come in and look at him, sir,” she said; and her look of disappointment when he said no, went to Edgar’s heart, full as it was of his own concerns. He turned back, and went in, and looked with awe upon the old, old worn face, which he remembered all his life. That wrinkled pallid countenance might have been a thousand years old, instead of only a hundred. Only a hundred! And poor old John, too, in his time had known troubles such as make years of days. One son had gone for a soldier, and been killed “abroad;” another had been the victim of an accident in the Liverpool docks, and was a cripple for life; another had “gone to the bad;” and there was a daughter, too, who had “gone to the bad”--landmarks enough to portion out the life of any man. Yet there he lay, so quiet after all, having shaken it off at last. Edgar, in his youth, in the first terrible shock of a misfortune which seemed to throw every other