en, but there was no one there. Joyce sprang down and
passed in, throwing off her large bonnet, and unfastening the clasp of
her cloak, which seemed like to choke her.

In the supreme moments of life the most trivial things always seem to
fasten upon the outward senses, as if to show, by force of contrast, the
enormous proportions of the great trouble--or the great joy, it may
be--which is at the time overshadowing us.

So Joyce, as she stood in the hall, noticed that one of the stag's
glass eyes had dropped out and lay upon the bench upon which Gilbert
Arundel had sat on the night of their adventure on the moor. She saw,
too, lying there, a large pair of scissors, and a roll of lint lay on
the window-seat, with a basin in which the water was coloured a pale
crimson. "They bandaged his head here," she thought,--and she was going
upstairs, when slow, heavy, jerky footsteps were heard, and Duke came
down, and, putting his nose into her hand, whined a low, piteous whine.

"Oh! Duke, Duke, where is he?"

As if he understood her human speech--as, indeed, he did, Duke turned to
precede her upstairs.

On a bench in the long corridor two maid servants were seated, crying
bitterly. But Joyce did not speak to them, she dared not; even the
question she had asked Duke died on her lips.

The door of her father's room was ajar; and as Duke pushed it open with
his nose, Joyce could see the great four-post bed, her mother sitting by
it, and curled up in the window-seat was Piers.

The friends who had been there in the early part of the day were gone;
they could do no more at Fair Acres. And Mr. Paget's aim was to set the
constables to work to find the man who must have hurled a sharp stone at
Mr. Falconer's head. The Wells doctor, too, was gone. He had a pressing
case near Wells upon his hands, but he was to return at eight o'clock,
when, it was hoped the doctor greater than himself, who had been
summoned from Bristol, would have arrived.

In those days help in emergency was slow to obtain. Telegrams were not
dreamed of, and horsepower performed the part which steam was soon to
take up; to be followed by the marvellous electric force, which now
sends on the wings of the wind messages all over the world, multiplied,
on the very day on which I write, to an enormous extent, by the
introduction of sixpenny telegrams, which will send a call for help, or
strike a note of joy, and win an immediate response from thousands.

But there