of a friend to advise her return to her husband at
present; that she would not herself hear of returning; that she had no
comfort, and her life was a burden to her; and that she could not
possibly keep her concealed much longer, and did not know what next to
do.

Polwarth answered only that he must make the acquaintance of Mrs. Faber.
If that could be effected, he believed he should be able to help them
out of their difficulties. Between them, therefore, they must arrange a
plan for his meeting her.

CHAPTER XLI.

THE OLD GARDEN.

The next morning, Juliet, walking listlessly up and down the garden,
turned the corner of a yew hedge, and came suddenly upon a figure that
might well have appeared one of the kobolds of German legend. He was
digging slowly but steadily, crooning a strange song--so low that, until
she saw him she did not hear him.

She started back in dismay. The kobold neither raised his head nor
showed other sign than the ceasing of his song that he was aware of her
presence. Slowly and steadily he went on with his work. He was trenching
the ground deep, still throwing the earth from the bottom to the top.
Juliet, concluding he was deaf, and the ceasing of his song accidental,
turned softly, and would have retreated. But Polwarth, so far from being
deaf, heard better than most people. His senses, indeed, had been
sharpened by his infirmities--all but those of taste and smell, which
were fitful, now dull and now exquisitely keen. At the first movement
breaking the stillness into which consternation had cast her, he spoke.

"Can you guess what I am doing, Mrs. Faber?" he said, throwing up a
spadeful and a glance together, like a man who could spare no time from
his work.

Juliet's heart got in the way, and she could not answer him. She felt
much as a ghost, wandering through a house, might feel, if suddenly
addressed by the name she had borne in the old days, while yet she was
clothed in the garments of the flesh. Could it be that this man led such
a retired life that, although living so near Glaston, and seeing so many
at his gate, he had yet never heard that she had passed from the ken of
the living? Or could it be that Dorothy had betrayed her? She stood
quaking. The situation was strange. Before her was a man who did not
seem to know that what he knew concerning her was a secret from all the
world besides! And with that she had a sudden insight into the
consequence of the fact of her exist