“Three more weeks pass away; the harvest is garnered, and the pears are growing soft and mellow. Mother’s and my outward life goes on in its silent regularity, nor do we talk much to each other of the tumult that rages--of the heartache that burns, within each of us. At the end of the three weeks, as we are sitting as usual, quietly employed, and buried each in our own thoughts, in the parlour, towards evening we hear wheels approaching the hall-door. We both run out as in my dream I had run to the door, and arrive in time to receive my father as he steps out of the carriage that has brought him. Well! at least _one_ of our wanderers has come home, but where is the other? “Almost before he has heartily kissed us both--wife and child--father cries out, ‘But where is Bobby?’ “‘That is just what I was going to ask you,’ replies mother quickly. “‘Is not he _here_ with you?’ returns he anxiously. “‘Not he,’ answers mother, ‘we have neither seen nor heard anything of him for more than six weeks.’ “‘Great God!’ exclaims he, while his face assumes an expression of the deepest concern, ‘what _can_ have become of him? what _can_ have happened to the poor fellow?’ “‘Has not he been with you, then?--has not he been in the _Thunderer_?’ asks mother, running her words into one another in her eagerness to get them out. “‘I sent him home three weeks ago in a prize, with a letter to you, and told him to stay with you till I came home, and what can have become of him since, God only knows!’ he answers with a look of the profoundest sorrow and anxiety. “There is a moment of forlorn and dreary silence; then I speak. I have been standing dumbly by, listening, and my heart growing colder and colder at every dismal word. “‘It is all my doing!’ I cry passionately, flinging myself down in an agony of tears on the straight-backed old settle in the hall. ‘It is my fault--no one else’s! The very last time that I saw him, I told him that he would have to thank me for his death, and he laughed at me, but it has come true. If I had not written _you_, father, that accursed letter, we should have had him here _now_, this _minute_, safe and sound, standing in the middle of us--as we never, _never_, shall have him again!’ “I stop, literally suffocated with emotion. “Father comes over, and lays his kind brown hand on my bent prone head. ‘My child,’ he says, ‘my dear child,’ (and tears are dimming the clear grey of his own eyes), ‘you are wrong to make up your mind to what is the worst at once. I do not disguise from you that there is cause for grave anxiety about the dear fellow, but still God is good; He has kept both him and me hitherto; into His hands we must trust our boy.’ “I sit up, and shake away my tears.