s by turns entreated and commanded her to
give him up, her father's distress or anger alike seemed indifferent to
her; and when he forbade Martin to come near the place, and kept her as
much as possible under his eye to prevent meetings between them, it
only roused in her a more obstinate determination to have her own way
in spite of him. She was missing one morning from the little bedroom
which Mrs Sands loved to keep as dainty and pretty as a lady's, and
from the garden where the roses and geraniums did such credit to her
care, and from her place in the little church where her prayer-book
still lay on the desk as she had left it the day before.

She had gone off with Martin Blake to London, without a word of sorrow
or farewell to the father who had been so foolishly fond of her, or to
the home where her happy petted childhood had passed. It nearly broke
her father's heart; it made an old man of him and turned his hair
white, and it seemed to freeze or petrify all his kindliness and human
sympathy.

He was a proud, reserved man, and could not bear the pity that every
one felt for him, or endure the well-meant but injudicious condolences,
mixed with 'I told you so,' and 'I 've thought for a long time,' which
the neighbours were so liberal with. Even Mr Clifford's attempts at
consolation he could hardly bring himself to listen to courteously, and
Jane Sands' tearful eyes and quivering voice irritated him beyond all
endurance. If there had been anyone to whom he could have talked
unrestrainedly and let out all the pent-up disappointment and wounded
love and tortured pride that surged and boiled within him, he might
have got through it better, or rather it might have raised him, as
rightly borne troubles do, above his poor, little, pitiful self, and
nearer to God; but this was just what he could not do.

He came nearest it sometimes in those long evenings of organ playing,
of the length of which poor little Jack Davis, the blower, so bitterly
complained, when the long sad notes wailed and sobbed through the
little church like the voice of a weary, sick soul making its
complaint. But even so he could not tell it all to God, though he had
been given that power of expression in music, which must make it easier
to those so gifted to cry unto the Lord.

But the music wailed itself into silence, and Jack in his corner by the
bellows waited terror-struck at the 'unked' sounds and the darkening
church, till he ventured at