After this Joyce said no more. They went at a fair pace along the lonely lanes; they passed through villages where the men were smoking pipes at the cottage doors, the women standing by with babies in their arms, while dusty, dirty little urchins played at "cross sticks" under the very nose of the old horse. Once they passed a small farm where a mother, neatly dressed, was standing at the gate, and a girl of fourteen ran out to meet a man with her baby brother in her arms, who stretched out his hands as the girl said: "Yes, there's daddy! Go to daddy; welcome, daddy!" Ah! how often had Joyce watched for her father at the gate! How her heart had thrilled with joy as she ran to meet him; and now! A low cry escaped her, which made Thomas turn his head, which he had hitherto kept steadily to the front, as if everything depended on his staring straight between the ears of the horse, and never looking to the right hand, or the left. Thomas was a hard featured man, who had served the old squire, and to whom Mr. Falconer was still "Master Arthur." "Doan't ee fret, my dear Miss Joyce. It's the hand of the Almighty." Ah, _was_ it the hand of Almighty Love, the God that had so lately revealed Himself to her in Christ, the All-loving as well as the All-mighty--was it possible He could take away 'the master from her head that day'? The old servant's voice quavering with sympathy made Joyce feel that she was also trembling on the brink of tears. "Thomas, I want to be brave, for I shall have to comfort him and mother." Then there was silence again. The even jog trot of the horse's heavy hoofs kept up a continuous rhythm: "Home, home again; home, home again--this seemed the burden of the strain--home, home again, but the same home never, never again." The evening shadows were lying across the turf where the daisies had closed their golden eyes for the night, when the gig turned into the familiar road and drew up at the door. The door was open, but there was no one there. Joyce sprang down and passed in, throwing off her large bonnet, and unfastening the clasp of her cloak, which seemed like to choke her. In the supreme moments of life the most trivial things always seem to fasten upon the outward senses, as if to show, by force of contrast, the enormous proportions of the great trouble--or the great joy, it may be--which is at the time overshadowing us. So Joyce, as she stood in the hall, noticed that one of the stag's glass eyes had dropped out and lay upon the bench upon which Gilbert Arundel had sat on the night of their adventure on the moor. She saw, too, lying there, a large pair of scissors, and a roll of lint lay on the window-seat, with a basin in which the water was coloured a pale crimson. "They bandaged his head here," she thought,--and she was going upstairs, when slow, heavy, jerky footsteps were heard, and Duke came down, and, putting his nose into her hand, whined a low, piteous whine. "Oh! Duke, Duke, where is he?"