r sorrow or sin.

"Come on home," she said, "it is bitterly cold here; and you can tell me
what to do."

He placed himself at the pony's head again, and trudged on speechlessly
along the rough road, which was now nothing more than the tracks made by
cart-wheels across the moor, with deep ruts over which he stumbled like
a man who is worn out with fatigue. In a quarter of an hour the low
cottage was reached, surrounded by a little belt of fields and a few
storm-beaten fir-trees. There was a dull glow of red to be seen through
the lattice window, telling Phebe of a smouldering fire, made up for her
by her father before going back to his workshop at the end of the field
behind the house. She stirred up the wood-ashes and threw upon them some
dry, light fagots of gorse, and in a few seconds a dazzling light filled
the little room from end to end. It was a familiar place to Roland
Sefton, and he took no notice of it. But it was a curious interior.
Every niche of the walls was covered with carved oak; no wainscoted hall
in the country could be more richly or more fancifully decorated. The
chimney-piece over the open hearth-stone, a wide chimney-piece, was
deeply carved with curious devices. The doors and window-frames, the
cupboards and the shelves for the crockery, were all of dark oak,
fashioned into leaves and ferns, with birds on their nests, and timid
rabbits, and still more timid wood-mice peeping out of their coverts,
cocks crowing with uplifted crest, and chickens nestling under the
hen-mother's wings, sheaves of corn, and tall, club-headed
bulrushes--all the objects familiar to a country life. The dancing light
played upon them, and shone also upon Roland Sefton's sad and weary
face. Phebe drew her father's carved arm-chair close to the fire.

"Sit down," she said, "and let me get you something to eat."

"Yes," he answered, sinking down wearily in the chair, "I am nearly
dying of hunger. Good Heavens! is it possible I can be hungry?"

He spoke with an indescribable expression of mingled astonishment and
dread. Suddenly there broke upon him the possibility of suffering want
in many forms in the future, and yet he felt ashamed of foreseeing them
in this, the first day of his great calamity. Until this moment he had
been too absorbed in dwelling upon the moral and social consequences of
his crime, to realize how utterly worn out he was; but all his physical
strength appeared to collapse in an instant.

And now for