Sorry at heart, Brion sought and found them there. It was indeed a modest tenement, but bright and clean--one of a little group standing almost against the walls of the old church of which the poor man himself had been at one time vicar. He hardly knew his former ward and pupil; seemed lost in the little woes and selfishnesses of senility, on which his daughter waited with a grave and patient motherliness which was very pretty and touching. She had grown out of Brion’s memory--not he out of hers. She seemed to measure him with her candid gray eyes, shyly, but with no lack of self-possession. He thought he read a quiet rebuke in them, read in her manner a pride of gentle repulse of an interest which years of so long neglect made little better than an effrontery. Such was his impression, though she may have meant nothing of the sort. She took him, by his own wish, to see her mother’s grave in the churchyard hard by, and watched him as he plucked a rose from a brier and laid it, with a kiss to its petals, under the headstone. And after that, when he spoke of old days, she seemed to answer with a more responsive kindness. They went into the church together, and he read once more the texts on the walls, which had been painted there in accordance with the great Queen’s own instructions, and on samples of which he had so often, as a child, put his own infantine interpretation. There was the ‘Man doth not live by bread alone,’ which on Sundays had always served him for a sort of jubilant sanction of the chopping dinner to follow, and presented the Deity as a jolly hospitable host, scorning half-measures; there was the ‘Man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upwards,’ which had brought an unfailing picture of the village blacksmith, whose wife was a notorious scold; there was the ‘Wizards that peep and that mutter,’ a cryptic and suspicious contribution--displayed near the pulpit, too--which had afforded him many delicious thrills. He fell into a smiling reverie, recalling them all and their associations, and only roused from it with a sigh to hear the girl beside him speaking:-- ‘Mother never forgot you, Master Middleton. You were in her mind to the last.’ He looked wistfully in her face; then took her hand and led her from the building. At the door he stopped, to point mutely to yet another scroll upon the wall:-- ‘I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.’ ‘You will let me, Alse?’ he entreated outside. ‘I have the right and the means to, notwithstanding all these years of separation.’ She understood him at once; but she shook her head, with a bright smile:-- ‘It is not so bad as that. We have enough, and to be independent and happy on. When the time comes, my brothers will care for me.’