The old man thanked God for his good son, and only hoped that he was not straitening himself to buy luxuries for a useless old fellow.

Another sacred kiss on that white head, and Tom was away for London, with a fuller purse, and a more self-contented heart too, than he had known for many a year.

And Elsley was left behind, under the grey church spire, sleeping with his fathers, and vexing his soul with poetry no more.  Mark has covered him now with a fair Portland slab.  He took Claude Mellot to it this winter before church time, and stood over it long with a puzzled look, as if dimly discovering that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in his philosophy.

“Wonderful fellow he was, after all!  Mary shall read us out some of his verses to-night.  But, I say, why should people be born clever, only to make them all the more miserable?”

“Perhaps they learn the more, papa, by their sorrows,” said quiet little Mary; “and so they are the gainers after all.”

And none of them having any better answer to give, they all three went into the church, to see if one could be found there.

And so Tom Thurnall, too, went Eastward-Ho, to take, like all the rest, what God might send.

CHAPTER XXVI.

TOO LATE.

And how was poor Grace Harvey prospering the while?  While comfortable folks were praising her, at their leisure, as a heroine, Grace Harvey was learning, so she opined, by fearful lessons, how much of the unheroic element was still left in her.  The first lesson had come just a week after the yacht sailed for Port Madoc, when the cholera had all but subsided; and it came in this wise.  Before breakfast one morning she had to go up to Heale’s shop for some cordial.  Her mother had passed, so she said, a sleepless night, and come downstairs nervous and without appetite, oppressed with melancholy, both in the spiritual and the physical sense of the word.  It was not often so with her now.  She had escaped the cholera.  The remoteness of her house; her care never to enter the town; the purity of the water, which trickled always fresh from the cliff close by; and last, but not least, the scrupulous cleanliness which (to do her justice) she had always observed, and in which she had trained up Grace,—­all these had kept her safe.

But Grace could see that her dread of the cholera was intense.  She even tried at first to prevent Grace from entering an infected house; but that proposal was answered by a look of horror which shamed her into silence, and she contented herself with all but tabooing Grace; making her change her clothes whenever she came in; refusing to sit with her, almost to eat with her.  But, over and above all this, she had grown moody, peevish, subject to violent bursts of crying, fits of superstitious depression; spent, sometimes, whole days in reading experimental books, arguing with the preachers, gadding to and fro to every sermon, Arminian or Calvinist; and at last even to Church—­walking in dry places, poor soul; seeking rest, and finding none.