ft the churchyard and made inquiries. The honourable and reverend
old rector was dead, and so were many of the choir; but by degrees the
sergeant-major learnt that his father still lay at the cross-roads in
Long Ash Lane.

Luke pursued his way moodily homewards, to do which, in the natural
course, he would be compelled to repass the spot, there being no other
road between the two villages. But he could not now go by that place,
vociferous with reproaches in his father's tones; and he got over the
hedge and wandered deviously through the ploughed fields to avoid the
scene. Through many a fight and fatigue Luke had been sustained by the
thought that he was restoring the family honour and making noble amends.
Yet his father lay still in degradation. It was rather a sentiment than
a fact that his father's body had been made to suffer for his own
misdeeds; but to his super-sensitiveness it seemed that his efforts to
retrieve his character and to propitiate the shade of the insulted one
had ended in failure.

He endeavoured, however, to shake off his lethargy, and, not liking the
associations of Sidlinch, hired a small cottage at Chalk-Newton which had
long been empty. Here he lived alone, becoming quite a hermit, and
allowing no woman to enter the house.

The Christmas after taking up his abode herein he was sitting in the
chimney corner by himself, when he heard faint notes in the distance, and
soon a melody burst forth immediately outside his own window, it came
from the carol-singers, as usual; and though many of the old hands, Ezra
and Lot included, had gone to their rest, the same old carols were still
played out of the same old books. There resounded through the sergeant-
major's window-shutters the familiar lines that the deceased choir had
rendered over his father's grave:-

He comes' the pri'-soners to' re-lease',
In Sa'-tan's bon'-dage held'.

When they had finished they went on to another house, leaving him to
silence and loneliness as before.

The candle wanted snuffing, but he did not snuff it, and he sat on till
it had burnt down into the socket and made waves of shadow on the
ceiling.

The Christmas cheerfulness of next morning was broken at breakfast-time
by tragic intelligence which went down the village like wind. Sergeant-
Major Holway had been found shot through the head by his own hand at the
cross-roads in Long Ash Lane where his father lay buried.

On the table in the cottage he