and made a hasty sign in the affirmative;
and, the false stranger and the little nurse being in their places, the
old horse moved off. Boxer, the unconscious Boxer, running on before,
running back, running round and round the cart, and barking as
triumphantly and merrily as ever.

When Tackleton had gone off likewise, escorting May and her mother home,
poor Caleb sat down by the fire beside his daughter; anxious and
remorseful at the core; and still saying, in his wistful contemplation
of her, "Have I deceived her from her cradle, but to break her heart at
last?"

The toys that had been set in motion for the Baby had all stopped and
run down long ago. In the faint light and silence, the imperturbably
calm dolls, the agitated rocking-horses with distended eyes and
nostrils, the old gentlemen at the street-doors, standing half doubled
up upon their failing knees and ankles, the wry-faced nut-crackers, the
very Beasts upon their way into the Ark, in twos, like a Boarding-School
out walking, might have been imagined to be stricken motionless with
fantastic wonder at Dot being false, or Tackleton beloved, under any
combination of circumstances.

CHIRP THE THIRD

The Dutch clock in the corner struck Ten when the Carrier sat down by
his fireside. So troubled and grief-worn that he seemed to scare the
Cuckoo, who, having cut his ten melodious announcements as short as
possible, plunged back into the Moorish Palace again, and clapped his
little door behind him, as if the unwonted spectacle were too much for
his feelings.

If the little Hay-maker had been armed with the sharpest of scythes, and
had cut at every stroke into the Carrier's heart, he never could have
gashed and wounded it as Dot had done.

It was a heart so full of love for her; so bound up and held together by
innumerable threads of winning remembrance, spun from the daily working
of her many qualities of endearment; it was a heart in which she had
enshrined herself so gently and so closely; a heart so single and so
earnest in its Truth, so strong in right, so weak in wrong,--that it
could cherish neither passion nor revenge at first, and had only room to
hold the broken image of its Idol.

But, slowly, slowly, as the Carrier sat brooding on his hearth, now cold
and dark, other and fiercer thoughts began to rise within him, as an
angry wind comes rising in the night. The Stranger was beneath his
outraged roof. Three steps would take him to his chamb