She bade him a kind good-night, and Ralph took up “The Cricket on the Hearth” and tried to read. But it would not do; the book had ceased to appeal to him. He threw it down, lowered the gas, and returned to the open window, leaning his arms on the sill and looking down through the bars at the dim road beneath, with its endless succession of cabs and carriages. For a little while it amused him to count the red and yellow lamps as they flitted by, but soon his sorrow overwhelmed him once more. It was the first time he had been alone since that morning hour in the fir-grove at Whinhaven, and now once more all the misery of his loss forced itself upon him. He was well fed, well housed, and his immediate future was provided for, yet, perhaps, in all London, there was not at that moment a more desolate little fellow. To be violently plucked up by the roots and for ever banished from that goodly heritage that had so far been his, was in itself hard enough; but to belong to no one in particular, to be planted down and expected to grow and thrive among loveless strangers seemed intolerable, and no ambitious dreams of a future in India came now to his help! He saw nothing before him but an endless vista of this same pain and aching loss. Tomorrow would be as to-day, and all real happiness had, he fancied, gone from him for ever. There is nothing quite so poignant as a child’s first great grief, though mercifully, like all acute pain, it cannot last long. The passing lights down below had long ceased to interest him, but presently through his tears he happened to notice the pointers and the Pole Star, and found a sort of comfort in what had for so long been familiar. At any rate the same sky was over Whinhaven and London, and the motto which he could remember puzzling over in his childhood, illuminated in one of the Rectory rooms, returned now to his mind--“Astra castra, Numen lumen.” It was true that the stars were his canopy, but was God his light? Had He not plunged his whole life in darkness, and set him far away from love and help and all that could keep a boy straight?