Will Blanchard hurried through the farm gate, where it swung idly with its sacred support gone forever; then he drew a great breath and glanced upwards before proceeding into the darkness of the unlighted house.  As he did so wheels grated at the entrance, and he knew that Doctor Parsons must be just behind him.  Above stairs the sick-room was still unlighted, the long-necked kettle still puffed steam, but the fire had shrunk, and Will’s first word was a protest that it had been allowed to sink so low.  Then he looked round, and the rainbow in his heart faded and died.  Damaris sat like a stone woman by the window; Phoebe lay upon the bed and hugged a little body in a blanket.  Her hair had fallen down; out of the great shadows he saw the white blur on her face, and heard her voice sound strange as she cried monotonously, in a tone from which the first passion had vanished through an hour of iteration.

“O God, give un back to me; O God, spare un; O kind God, give my li’l bwoy back.”

CHAPTER VII

GREY TWILIGHT

In the soft earth they laid him, “the little child whose heart had fallen asleep,” and from piling of a miniature mound, from a small brown tumulus, now quite hid under primroses, violets, and the white anemones of the woods, Will Blanchard and his mother slowly returned to Newtake.  He wore his black coat; she was also dressed in black; the solitary mourning coach dragged slowly up the hill to the Moor, and elsewhere another like it conveyed Mr. Lyddon homeward.

Neither mother nor son had any heart to speak.  The man’s soul was up in arms; he had rebelled against his life, and since the death of his boy, while Phoebe remained inert in her desolation and languished under a mental and bodily paralysis wherein she had starved to death but for those about her, he, on the contrary, found muscle and mind clamouring for heroic movement.  He was feverishly busy upon the farm, and ranged in thought with a savage activity among the great concerns of men.  His ill-regulated mind, smarting under the blows of Chance, whirled from that past transient wave of superstitious emotion into an opposite extreme.  Now he was ashamed of his weakness, and suffered convictions proper to the narrowness of an immature intellect to overwhelm him.  He assured himself that his tribulations were not compatible with the existence of a Supreme Being.  Like poor humanity the wide world over, his judgment became vitiated, his views distorted under the stroke of personal sorrow, and, beneath the pressure of that gigantic egotism which ever palsies the mind of man at sudden loss of what he holds dearest upon earth, poor Blanchard cried in his heart there was no God.