But he bethought him that he had not before known her light a fire, and the day certainly was not a cold one.  Again, how was it that with the cries of the boys in her ears, searching for a sight of the body in her very garden, she had never come from the house, or even looked from a window?  Then it came to his mind what a place for concealment the Old House was:  he knew every corner of it; and thus he arrived at what was almost the conviction that Mrs. Faber was there.  When a day or two had passed, he was satisfied that, for some reason or other, she was there for refuge.  The reason must be a good one, else Dorothy would not be aiding—­and it must of course have to do with her husband.

He next noted how, for some time, Dorothy never went through his gate, although he saw reason to believe she went to the Old House every day.  After a while, however, she went through it every day.  They always exchanged a few words as she passed, and he saw plainly enough that she carried a secret.  By and by he began to see the hover of words unuttered about her mouth; she wished to speak about something but could not quite make up her mind to it.  He would sometimes meet her look with the corresponding look of “Well, what is it?” but thereupon she would invariably seem to change her mind, would bid him good morning, and pass on.

CHAPTER XL.

A DESOLATION.

When Faber at length returned to Glaston, his friends were shocked at his appearance.  Either the hand of the Lord, or the hand of crushing chance, had been heavy upon him.  A pale, haggard, worn, enfeebled man, with an eye of suffering, and a look that shrunk from question, he repaired to his desolate house.  In the regard of his fellow-townsmen he was as Job appeared to the eyes of his friends; and some of them, who knew no more of religion than the sound of its name, pitied him that he had not the comfort of it.  All Glaston was tender to him.  He walked feebly, seldom showed the ghost of a smile, and then only from kindness, never from pleasure.  His face was now almost as white as that of his lost Juliet.  His brother doctors behaved with brotherly truth.  They had attended to all his patients, poor as well as rich, and now insisted that he should resume his labors gradually, while they fulfilled his lack.  So at first he visited only his patients in the town, for he was unable to ride; and his grand old horse, Ruber, in whom he trusted, and whom he would have ventured sooner to mount than Niger, was gone!  For weeks he looked like a man of fifty; and although by degrees the restorative influences of work began to tell upon him, he never recovered the look of his years.  Nobody tried to comfort him.  Few dared, for very reverence, speak to the man who carried in him such an awful sorrow.  Who would be so heartless as counsel him to forget it? and what other counsel was there for one who refused like him?  Who could