Her husband, however, came upstairs after her, by himself. Mildmay had gone out for a stroll, he said, and seemed to prefer being alone; he was afraid, after all, he was a morose sort of fellow, with very little "go" in him. As for the new rector, he was very glad to get out into the stillness of the dewy common after the hot room and the fumes of Mr. Ascott's excellent port, which he disliked, being altogether a man of the new school. He skirted the common under the soft light of some stars, and the incipient radiance of the moon, which had not yet risen, but showed that she was rising. He went even as far as the back of the rectory, and that little path which the curate's feet had worn, which he followed reverently to the grey cross upon Hester's grave. Here a flood of peaceful and friendly thoughts came over the young man, bringing the tears to his eyes. He had only known Mr. St. John for about twenty-four hours, yet how much this short acquaintance had affected him! He seemed to be thinking of a dear old friend when he remembered the few moments he had stood here, six weeks before, listening to the curate's simple talk. "The lights in the girls' windows;"--there they were, the only lights in the dark house, a glimmer through the half-closed shutters. Then he thought of the old man, bewildered with death and death's weakness, sitting with his wife's cloak and hat ready, waiting for her to come who had been waiting all these years under the sod for him to come. "I shall go to her, but she will not come to me," said the new rector to himself, letting a tear fall upon the cross, where the curate's hand had rested so tenderly. His heart was full of that swelling sensation of sympathetic sorrow which is both sweet and painful. And _she_ was, they all said, so like her mother. Would any one, he wondered, think of _her_ sometimes as Mr. St. John had done of his Hester? Or would nobody, in his senses, marry a girl burdened with two babies dependent on her? When those words came back to his mind, his cheeks reddened, his pace quickened in a sudden flush of anger. And it was a woman who had said it--a woman whose heart, it might have been thought, would have bled for the orphans, not much more than children any of them, who were thus left in the world to struggle for themselves.