There was still Elinor and Maggie and Deborah at home besides Marion, and Jack, who had come home to study for a Civil Service examination, had not yet obtained an appointment, although he had passed. He would probably have had to give it up but for the kindly help of a nobleman, the son of a duke, whose tenant the farmer had been, and he was thus enabled to obtain an appointment in the same town. Elinor went away from home to keep house for an uncle, she being about this time nineteen. Then set in those days of poverty and greyness and lovelessness which are so bitter to old and young hearts alike. But to Deborah, for the time, the feeling of utter emptiness and desolation deadened all others. There was no one to come home for, no one to want to look nice for, no one to watch for at the window, no one to work hard at lessons for, no one, in fact, to do anything for. They called it “home.” Perhaps in some ways it still was home, but where is the real spirit of home when father and mother have both gone? There was little of light or warmth in this home now. It had dwindled down to four, two being children and two grown up. And so things went on, without much love anywhere, chill and comfortless. Besides the desolation caused by the sudden cutting of loved companionship there hung round the house the feeling which always follows on a tragedy. It appeared as if in every room there hovered a silent, fleeting cloud of pain—none the less felt because it was not seen. On the stairs, in the hall, in the sitting-rooms, in the shabby little bedroom, and in the kitchen one felt as if the dead face were still looking out, hopelessly, miserably, silently, and many a time, when Deborah passed through, the sharp aching pain she was getting to understand so well would rise full in her heart to think of him. Her mind constantly dwelt on him; it was impossible to forget. Nightly she dreamt about him, and it was always that he had come back again. Each night for months the same dream would come, each time with some little change to give it more reality, and each morning she awoke to find it but a dream. Each night and morning tears filled the place of prayers, since father was gone, and along with him everything worth living for, and the remembrance of his misery remained alone. These terrible dreams went on for months—horrible, hateful things, like some refined torture, holding the brightness of hope for one minute only to supplant it the next by the blackness of despair. Deborah always believed that he had really come, as sometimes he would take her hand and smile and say, “I have really come this time, it is now no dream at all,” and she would awake happy, only to get up miserable. At last there came another quite different dream, one whose beauty and reality was like cool, healing balm to hot suffering.