g, "as long as you need
me most--you two. And I owe all I am to Jean Merle himself."

The little homely cottage with its thatched roof and small lattice
windows was more welcome to her than any other dwelling could have been.
Now her world had suffered such a change, it was pleasant to come here,
where nothing had been altered since her childhood. Both within and
without the old home was as unchanged as the beautiful outline of the
hills surrounding it and the vast hollow of the sky above. Here she
might live over again the past--the whole past. She was a woman, with a
woman's sad experience of life; but there was much of the girl, even of
the child, left in Phebe Marlowe still; and no spot on earth could have
brought back her youth to her as this inheritance of hers. There was an
unspoiled simplicity about her which neither time nor change could
destroy--the childlikeness of one who had entered into the kingdom of
heaven.

It was a year since she had been here last, with Hilda in her first
grief for her mother's death; and everywhere she found traces of Jean
Merle's handiwork. The half-shaped blocks of wood, left unfinished for
years in her father's workshop, were completed. The hawk hovering over
its prey, which the dumb old wood-carver had begun as a symbol of the
feeling of vengeance he could not give utterance to when brooding over
Roland Sefton's crime, had been brought to a marvellous perfection by
Jean Merle's practised hand, and it had been placed by him under the
crucifix which old Marlowe had fastened in the window-frame, where the
last rays of daylight fell upon the bowed head hidden by the crown of
thorns. The first night that Phebe sat alone, on the old hearth, her
eyes rested upon these until the daylight faded away, and the darkness
shut them out from her sight. Had Jean Merle known what he did when he
laid this emblem of vengeance beneath this symbol of perfect love and
sacrifice?

But after a few days, when she had visited every place of yearly
pilgrimage, knitting up the slackened threads of memory, Phebe began to
realize the terrible solitude of this isolated home of hers. To live
again where no step passed by and no voice spoke to her, where not even
the smoke of a household hearth floated up into the sky, was intolerable
to her genial nature, which was only satisfied in helpful and pleasant
human intercourse. The utter silence became irksome to her, as it had
been in her girlhood; but even then