Hildred and Cuthbert lived long and happily. It was some years before I let Cuthbert know where I was. Then immediately he came to me. After that we saw each other every now and then; and though meeting seldom, we were yet friends and brothers, as we had always been. There never was another secret between us. Hildred long before had told her husband all the story of his four years of absence. But I never went back to Wyncliffe until I was an old man. It was after an illness that I had, during which my thoughts turned constantly to Hildred. A longing for her presence, that had been stilled for many years, woke up once more and drew me towards her. When next Cuthbert came to see me I went back with him to Wyncliffe. As in a dream, nay rather, as one returning from the dead, I saw again the once familiar places--the grey church, the lime-trees, the village-green, where they were playing cricket just as they used in my day. No one knew the old man. All the faces that I met were strange to me; some only bore a dim ghostly likeness to people I had known. Once or twice Cuthbert told me the name of a passer-by, as we went along slowly under the lime-trees. That was Jock Clifford's son, with the bat over his shoulder, a young man, fair and ruddy, but twice as old as his father was when I last saw him. From one of the cottages a child ran out, a brown-eyed toddling little girl, who came towards Cuthbert with a scream of pleasure, and called him grandfather. 'Our boy Will's little lass,' said Cuthbert, raising her on to his shoulder. He called to a woman passing by and bade her come and see an old friend. She came with the hesitating look of one who is told to speak to a stranger. 'You do not know him, Phillis,' Cuthbert said. Was that Phillis, Hildred's little niece, the laughing rosy child that I remembered? Could this be her? My heart failed me. The day that I belonged to had indeed passed away. I could not bear to see Hildred grown strange to me like the rest. It was not that I should love the altered face less, far from it. But I had carried the young bright image of my one love for so long in my heart, I could not bear to lose it. For those who lived with her, each line, each change, must have grown dear. To me they would be strange, and I feared lest afterwards I might never be able to call back again the gracious presence that had cheered my lonely life. So, as twilight was over before we reached the Castle, I begged Cuthbert to leave me by the old well, and to bring Hildred to me there, that, in the darkness, I might hold her hand and hear her voice once more, then go my way, and still think of her without one shadow on her face that time or care had thrown. Cuthbert, willing to do my pleasure though he but half understood me, obeyed my wish.