apply herself to the blind cord.
In the mere instant which intervened between this and the descent of the
blind she looked at him with a profound and passionate scorn. The old
man sighed, and nodding his head up and down retraced his steps, but
lingering in the pathway in the little garden, and surveying the house
wistfully, he was again aware of Rachel, who faced him once more with an
unchanging countenance. This time she appeared at the parlor window,
and a second time the blind came down between him and her gaze of
uncompromising scorn.

"Eh, dear!" he said, tremblingly, as he turned away. "Her's got reason
to think it, poor thing. It's hard to find out the ways o' Providence.
If it warn't for good it couldn't ha' happened, but it's a heavy burden
all the same."

CHAPTER XIII.

Ezra walked home and sat there alone until evening. His house-keeper
routed him from his armchair for dinner and tea, and at each meal he
made a feeble pretence of eating and drinking, and, having been scolded
for his poor appetite, went back to his old place. He sat there till the
room was dark, scarcely moving, but wearing no very noticeable sign of
pain or trouble. The story was so old, and the misfortune it related was
so long past mending! He had been gray himself these many years, and the
things which surrounded him and touched him had long since shared all
his own want of color.

There was no relighting these old ashes. And yet, in defiance of that
avowed impossibility, they seemed now and again to glow. They warmed him
and lighted him back to a perception of lost odor and dead color. They
stung him into some remembrance of the pain of years ago. And then,
again, they were altogether cold and lifeless.

He said vaguely in a half whisper that it was a pity; and the phrase
rose to his lips a hundred times--oftener than not an utterance purely
mechanical, and expressing neither regret for Rachel nor for himself,
nor sorrow for their division. When he was not thinking of her or of
himself, he murmured that this was how it had come to pass, and did not
seem to care or feel at all.

When the gloom was deepening in Ezra's ill-lighted chamber, though the
light of the summer evening still lingered outside, the house-keeper
came in and drew the blinds, and left behind her a single candle, which
left the room as dusky as before. Shortly after this Reuben came in,
and Ezra, nodding, signed him to a chair. The young man took a seat in