The fowl dished up by the landlady and served upon fine linen, was plump, and juicy and aromatic enough to re-excite the appetite of an alderman after Mansion House dinner; but Holdsworth hardly touched it. The woman looked vexed as she removed it, for the neglect of such a dainty was as good as a spoken disparagement of her skill as a cook. She set a fine cheese, fresh from the farmhouse over the way, upon the table, and butter from the same dairy, firm and sweet-smelling, as butter should be; but these were left untasted.

“I don’t know who he may be,” she whispered to her husband, outside, “but if he don’t make a better dinner than this every day, it’s no wonder his body’s a shadder.”

The setting sunshine streamed into the little parlour in which Holdsworth sat, and enriched the room with its vivid crimson light; the soft evening breeze wafted pleasant perfumes through the open window; and in the air was the tender and delightful peace which falls with an appreciable hush over little country villages, where the sinking of the sun is the signal for rest.

Holdsworth had made up his mind to sleep in Southbourne that night. He needed the silence and the solitude the little inn promised him, that he might meditate upon the steps he should now take.

The feverish misery that had been born in him by the landlady’s story was, in some measure, tranquillised, and he had now the power, at least, to think with tolerable clearness. And yet he was sorely perplexed, as he sat with his head resting on his hand and his weary eyes fixed on the little garden outside. Impulses were governing him that made his mind incline from side to side like a pendulum. Had Mr. Newcome been alive—the kind and good old rector, whom he recalled with love—he would have gone to him, avowed himself, and entreated his counsel.

He felt that Dolly was dead to him. He felt this, though no words that he had at his command would have enabled him to explain his ideas. His own grand sense of honour witnessed this truth, that she had married another man in full belief that he—John Holdsworth—was dead; and he recognised and appreciated the force of the overwhelming claims of the moral obligation imposed on him to leave her belief undisturbed. Why? Because its disturbance would generate a heavy burden of shame, would make her practically false to both men, and stain her nature with a sin whose hue would not be the less dark in the sight of the world because her conscience had no share in it.

Such instinctive perception of the high needs of the seldom-paralleled situation his fate had placed him in, could only have possessed a man of deep honour, great humanity, and rare unselfishness.

But his child!

The child of his own passionate love for Dolly. There was the magnetic power that drew all his inclinations away from the silent command of honour.

To see her—to behold himself renewed in a sweet child’s face—to press his lips once to her cheek—once only, if nevermore!

Oh! not once—not once only! To dwell near her, to have her in his sight, to watch them both, and live out the years that should be allotted him in secret contemplation of the joy, the sacred pleasures, the divine emotions embodied in this woman and her babe; happinesses which had been broken away from his life—could not this be?

He started up and looked at himself in the glass over the mantel-shelf. Had suffering wrought in his face to such poor purpose, that even the eye of love could pierce through the sunken mask? His child knew him not—and Dolly, deeming him dead, and holding him a thing of the irreclaimable past, could not behold—could never imagine that she beheld—in that bowed figure, that bearded face, those hollow eyes, that hair with patches of gray all over it, the handsome, vigorous, upright, clear-eyed man whom she had called husband.

Husband! ... and she had left him.

Stop! Passages of the landlady’s story echoed in his ears; how the poor young lady was starving; how she had a tiny baby to support; how the workhouse seemed better to her than the hopeless, scanty produce of the needle; how she held back, reluctant to give her hand to the man who wished to marry her; how she had wept when her hand was given!

Oh, husband! oh, lover! though to the past only those titles now belong; by your own sufferings, remember hers! By your own misery, when, feeling yourself dying alone on the great deep, your physical torments yielded to the fiercer tortures of your heart when you thought of your wife praying for him, whom, you said to yourself, she shall never see again, remember her! pity her! Was his imagination so poor that he could not find it in him to make, out of the landlady’s brief tale, a pregnant, bitter picture of his wife’s trials? Not so! To such a heart as his, one hint of misery would bring with it many piteous details. There was infinite anguish in the picture his fancy drew; but he forced himself to contemplate it, that the jealousy, the disappointment, the despair of unfulfilled hope, might melt out of his heart, and leave it a fit shrine for the consecration of the two images which the uncontrollable will of his humanity as a father and a husband declared should be placed there.

His fingers had stolen over his face as he stood before the looking-glass. A long time he thus remained, while the sun went down behind the trees in the far-off fields, and the twilight stole softly into the room and made his figure visionary. When he withdrew his hands from his eyes, they were wet; but the one star shining clearly in the dark blue overhead had dawned out of the light to witness a fairer sight than the sun had shone upon—a face from which all vestige of hardness and severity had passed, eyes heavy with tears upturned to God’s kingdom, and lips whispering a prayer for help, for courage, for counsel, to aid the resolution of his heart, intent upon a noble self-sacrifice that should yet not remove it from the sphere of all that it held dearest on earth.