The people of the sparsely inhabited district came to gaze at the wreck, and from far and near they gathered together two days after the fire, to see Gil's men carry the flower-sprinkled bier from Croftly's house to the little rustic churchyard two miles away, the men taking it in turns to bear her, four and four about. The place was densely crowded, thinly populated as was the country there, to see Gil Carr and the weak, broken founder, who seemed to have aged in one night to a venerable old man, walk hand in hand behind, and stand bareheaded while Master Peasegood read, and sobbed, and read, and finally letting fall his book, went down upon his knees in the soft earth, and prayed beside the grave. Sir Mark chafed more and more, but it was in vain. He was to have been chief actor in another scene; here he was completely set aside again, and Gil Carr had resumed his place. Fortunately for Sir Mark, his old acquaintance Sir Thomas Beckley came forward to offer his hospitality, and he took up his abode with him, feeling that he could not leave the place with his task undone, and in a bitter mood he received the attempts at consolation offered to him by Anne, who, however, always kept very much aloof, playing the part of the injured woman, but promising herself a sharp revenge, if ever the King's messenger should again lay siege unto her heart. Up to the day of the funeral the founder had been almost childish from the effects of the shock; but after that he seemed to have recovered himself, though he looked aged and bent, and changed to a remarkable degree. "I was very hard upon you, Gil," he said to him one evening, as they stood leaning against one of the posts that had helped to support the swing bridge now completely swept away, and whose place was occupied by a couple of stout planks laid across the race. "I was very hard upon you, my lad, but, though I made that affair of Abel Churr's an excuse, I don't think I believed at heart that you did away with the poor wandering wretch." Gil looked at him sadly, and bowed his head without speaking. "What are you going to do now, my lad?" continued the founder, gazing at him with a yearning look as one his lost child had loved. "To do?" said Gil, in a low hopeless tone, "to do? What is there left to do, sir, but die?" "Hush, my lad," said the founder, laying a trembling hand upon the young man's arm; "that is for me to say. I am old and stricken: the storm has torn one great branch from the trunk, and the old tree will slowly wither and die. You are young yet, and hope will come to you again as time goes on." "Hush, for God's sake, hush!" cried Gil, turning upon him almost fiercely; then, gazing round him in the gathering gloom of the evening, he let himself sink, upon his knees lower and lower, with his hands covering his face, as for the first time in the solitude of that blasted home he gave full vent to the pent-up agony that for days and days he had striven to hide.