s gate,
although he saw reason to believe she went to the Old House every day.
After a while, however, she went through it every day. They always
exchanged a few words as she passed, and he saw plainly enough that she
carried a secret. By and by he began to see the hover of words unuttered
about her mouth; she wished to speak about something but could not quite
make up her mind to it. He would sometimes meet her look with the
corresponding look of "Well, what is it?" but thereupon she would
invariably seem to change her mind, would bid him good morning, and pass
on.

CHAPTER XL.

A DESOLATION.

When Faber at length returned to Glaston, his friends were shocked at
his appearance. Either the hand of the Lord, or the hand of crushing
chance, had been heavy upon him. A pale, haggard, worn, enfeebled man,
with an eye of suffering, and a look that shrunk from question, he
repaired to his desolate house. In the regard of his fellow-townsmen he
was as Job appeared to the eyes of his friends; and some of them, who
knew no more of religion than the sound of its name, pitied him that he
had not the comfort of it. All Glaston was tender to him. He walked
feebly, seldom showed the ghost of a smile, and then only from kindness,
never from pleasure. His face was now almost as white as that of his
lost Juliet. His brother doctors behaved with brotherly truth. They had
attended to all his patients, poor as well as rich, and now insisted
that he should resume his labors gradually, while they fulfilled his
lack. So at first he visited only his patients in the town, for he was
unable to ride; and his grand old horse, Ruber, in whom he trusted, and
whom he would have ventured sooner to mount than Niger, was gone! For
weeks he looked like a man of fifty; and although by degrees the
restorative influences of work began to tell upon him, he never
recovered the look of his years. Nobody tried to comfort him. Few dared,
for very reverence, speak to the man who carried in him such an awful
sorrow. Who would be so heartless as counsel him to forget it? and what
other counsel was there for one who refused like him? Who could have
brought himself to say to him--"There is loveliness yet left, and within
thy reach: take the good, etc.; forget the nothing that has been, in the
something that may yet for awhile avoid being nothing too; comfort thy
heart with a fresh love: the time will come to forget both, in the
everlasting tomb of the anci