The winter fogs which made London so gloomy did not leave the country sky clear and bright. All the land lay under a shroud of mist and vapor; and even on the uplands round old Marlowe's little farmstead the heavens were gray and cold, and the wide prospect shut out by a curtain of dim clouds.

The rude natural tracks leading over the moor to the farm became almost impassable. The thatched roof was sodden with damp, and the deep eaves shed off the water with the sound of a perpetual dropping. Behind the house the dark, storm-beaten, distorted firs, and the solitary yew-tree blown all to one side, grew black with the damp. The isolation of the little dwelling-place was as complete as if a flood had covered the face of the earth, leaving its two inmates the sole survivors of the human race.

Several months had passed since old Marlowe had executed his last piece of finished work. The blow that Rowland Sefton's dishonesty had inflicted upon him had paralyzed his heart—that most miserable of all kinds of paralysis. He could still go about, handle his tools, set his thin old fingers to work; but as soon as he had put a few marks upon his block of oak his heart died with him, and he threw down his useless tools with a sob as bitter as ever broke from an old man's lips.

There was no relief for him, as for other men, in speech easily, perhaps hastily uttered, in companionship with his fellows. Any solace of this kind was too difficult and too deliberate for him to seek it in writing his lamentations on a slate or spelling them off on his fingers, but his grief and anger struck inward more deeply.

Phebe saw his sorrow, and would have cheered him if she could; but she, too, was sorely stricken, and she was young. She tried to set him an example of diligent work, and placed her easel beside his carving, painting as long as the gray and fleeting daylight permitted. Now and then she attempted to sing some of her old merry songs, knowing that his watchful eyes would see the movement of her lips; but though her lips moved, her face was sad and her heart heavy. Sometimes, too, she forgot all about her, and fell into an absorbed reverie, brooding over the past, until a sob or half-articulate cry from her father aroused her. These outcries of his troubled her more than any other change in him. He had been altogether mute in the former tranquil and placid days, satisfied to talk with her in silent signs; but there was something in his mind to express now which quiet and dumb signs could not convey. At intervals, both by day and night, her affection for him was tortured by these hoarse and stifled cries of grief mingled with rage.

There was a certain sense of the duties of citizenship in old Marlowe's mind which very few women, certainly not a girl as young as Phebe, could have shared. Many years ago the elder Sefton had perceived that the companionless man was groping vaguely after many a dim thought, political and social, which few men of his class would have been troubled with. He had given to him several books, which old Marlowe had pondered over. Now he felt that, quite apart from his own personal ground of resentment, he had done wrong to the laws of his country by aiding an offender of them to escape and elude the just penalty. He felt almost a contempt for Roland Sefton that he had not remained to bear the consequences of his crime.

The news of Roland's death brought something like satisfaction to his mind; there was a chill, dejected sense of justice having been done. He had not prospered in his crime. Though he had eluded man's judgment, yet vengeance had not suffered him to live. There was no relenting toward him, as there was in Mr. Clifford's mind. Something like the old heathen conception of a divine righteousness in this arbitrary punishment of the evil-doer gave him a transient content. He did not object therefore to Phebe's hasty visit to Mrs. Sefton at the sea-side, in order to break the news to her. The inward satisfaction he felt sustained him, and he even set about a piece of work long since begun, a hawk swooping down upon his prey.

The evening on which Phebe reached home again he was more like his former self. He asked her many questions about the sea, which he had never seen, and told her what he had been doing while she was away. An old, well-thumbed translation of Plato's Dialogues was lying on the carved dresser behind him, in which he had been reading every night. Instead of the Bible, he said.

"It was him, Mr. Roland, that gave it to me," he continued; "and listen to what I read last night: 'Those who have committed crimes, great yet not unpardonable, they are plunged into Tartarus, where they go who betray their friends for money, the pains of which they undergo for a year. But at the end of the year they come forth again to a lake, over which the souls of the dead are taken to be judged. And then they lift up their voices, and call upon the souls of them they have wronged to have pity upon them, and to forgive them, and let them come out of their prison. And if they prevail they come forth, and cease from their troubles; but if not they are carried back again into Tartarus, until they obtain mercy of them whom they have wronged.' But it seems as if they have to wait until them they have wronged are dead themselves."

The brown, crooked fingers ceased spelling out the solemn words, and Phebe lifted up her eyes from them to her father's face. She noticed for the first time how sunken and sallow it was, and how dimly and wearily his eyes looked out from under their shaggy eyebrows. She buried her face in her hands, and broke down into a passion of tears. The vivid picture her father's quotation brought before her mind filled it with horror and grief that passed all words.

The wind was wailing round the house with a ceaseless moan of pain, in which she could almost distinguish the tones of a human voice lamenting its lost and wretched fate. The cry rose and fell, and passed on, and came back again, muttering and calling, but never dying away altogether. It sounded to her like the cry of a belated wanderer calling for help. She rose hastily and opened the cottage door, as if she could hear Roland Sefton's voice through the darkness and the distance. But he was dead, and had been in his grave for many days already. Was she to hear that lost, forlorn cry ringing in her ears forever? Oh, if she could but have known something of him between that night, when he walked beside her through the dark deserted roads, pouring out his whole sorrowful soul to her, and the hour when in the darkness again he had strayed from his path, and been swallowed up of death! Was it true that he had gone down into that great gulf of secrecy and silence, without a word of comfort spoken, or a ray of light shed upon its profound mystery?

The cold wind blew in through the open door, and she shut it again, going back to her low chair on the hearth. Through her blinding tears she saw her father's brown hands stretched out to her, and the withered fingers speaking eagerly.

"I shall be there before long," he said; "he will not have to wait very long for me. And if you bid me I will forgive him at once. I cannot bear to see your tears. Tell me: must I forgive him? I will do anything, if you will look up at me again and smile."

It was a strange smile that gleamed through Phebe's tears, but she had never heard an appeal like this from her dumb father without responding to it.

"Must I forgive him?" he asked.

"'If ye forgive men their trespasses,'" she answered, "'your heavenly Father will also forgive yours; but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive yours.' It was our Lord Jesus Christ who said that, not your old Socrates, father."

"It is a hard saying," he replied.

"I don't think so," she said; "it was what Jesus Christ was doing every day he lived."

From that time old Marlowe did not mention Roland Sefton again, or his sin against him.

As the dark stormy days passed on he sometimes put a touch or two to the outstretched wings of his swooping hawk, but it did not get on fast. With a pathetic clinging to Phebe he seldom let her stay long out of his sight, but followed her about like a child, or sat on the hearth watching her as she went about her house-work. Only by those unconscious sobs and outcries, inaudible to himself, did he betray the grief that was gnawing at his heart. Very often did Phebe put aside her work, and standing before him ask such questions as the following on her swiftly moving fingers.

"Don't you believe in God, our Father in heaven, the Father Almighty, who made us?"

"Yes," he would reply by a nod.

"And in Jesus Christ, His Son, our Lord, who lived, and died for us, and rose again?"

"Yes, yes," was the silent, emphatic answer.

"And yet you grieve and fret over the loss of money!" she would say, with a wistful smile on her young face.

"You are a child; you know nothing," he replied.

For without a sigh the old man was going forward consciously to meet death. Every morning when the dawn awoke him he felt weaker as he rose from his bed; every day his sight was dimmer and his hand less steady; every night the steep flight of stairs seemed steeper, and he ascended them feebly by his hands as well as feet. He could not bring himself to write upon his slate or to spell out upon his fingers the dread words, "I am dying;" and Phebe was not old or experienced enough to read the signs of an approaching death. That her father should be taken away from her never crossed her thoughts.

It was the vague, mournful prospect of soon leaving her alone in the wide world that made his loss loom more largely and persistently before the dumb old man's mind. Certainly he believed all that Phebe said to him. God loved her, cared for her, ordered her life; yet he, her father, could not reconcile himself to the idea of her being left penniless and friendless in the cold and cruel world. He could have left her more peacefully in God's hands if she had those six hundred pounds of his earnings to inherit.

The sad winter wore slowly away. Now and then the table-land around them put on its white familiar livery of snow, and old Marlowe's dim eyes gazed at it through his lattice window, recollecting the winters of long years ago, when neither snow nor storm came amiss to him. But the slight sprinkling soon melted away, and the dun-colored fog and cloudy curtain shut them in again, cutting them off from the rest of the world as if their little dwelling was the ark stranded on the hill's summit amid a waste of water.