ed, a great calm stole upon his spirit,
and kneeling down there by the open window, with the breath of spring
upon his brow, and the voice of the happy birds within his ears, he
prayed to the Almighty with all his heart that it might please Him in
His wise mercy to verify his dream, inasmuch as he would be well
content to suffer, if by suffering he might at last attain to such an
unutterable joy. And rising from his knees, feeling better and
stronger, he knew in some dim way that that undertaking must be blest
which, in such a solemn hour of the heart, he did not fear to pray God
to guide, to guard, and to consummate.

And on many an after-day, and in many another place, the book of his
life would reopen at this well-conned page, and he would see the dim
light in the faint, flushed sky, and hear the song of the thrush
swelling upwards strong and sweet, and remember his prayer and the
peace that fell upon his soul.

By ten o'clock that morning, Arthur, his dog, and his portmanteau, had
all arrived together in front of the Abbey House. Before his feet had
touched the moss-grown gravel, the hall-door was flung open, and
Angela appeared to welcome him, looking, as old Sam the ostler
forcibly put it afterwards to his helper, "just like a hangel with the
wings off." Jakes, too, emerged from the recesses of the garden, and
asked Angela, in a tone of aggrieved sarcasm, as he edged his way
suspiciously past Aleck, why the gentleman had not brought the
"rampingest lion from the Zoologic Gardens" with him at once? Having
thus expressed his feelings on the subject of bull-dogs, he shouldered
the portmanteau, and made his way with it upstairs. Arthur followed
him up the wide oak stairs, every one of which was squared out of a
single log, stopping for a while on the landing, where the staircase
turned, to gaze at the stern-faced picture that hung so that it looked
through the large window facing it, right across the park and over the
whole stretch of the Abbey lands, and to wonder at the deep-graved
inscription of "Devil Caresfoot" set so conspicuously beneath.

His room was the largest upon the first landing, and the same in which
Angela's mother had died. It had never been used from that hour to
this, and, indeed, in a little recess or open space between a cupboard
and the wall, there still stood two trestles, draped with rotten black
cloth, that had originally been brought there to rest her coffin on,
and which Angela had overl