of the unlighted house. As
he did so wheels grated at the entrance, and he knew that Doctor Parsons
must be just behind him. Above stairs the sick-room was still unlighted,
the long-necked kettle still puffed steam, but the fire had shrunk, and
Will's first word was a protest that it had been allowed to sink so low.
Then he looked round, and the rainbow in his heart faded and died.
Damaris sat like a stone woman by the window; Phoebe lay upon the bed
and hugged a little body in a blanket. Her hair had fallen down; out of
the great shadows he saw the white blur on her face, and heard her voice
sound strange as she cried monotonously, in a tone from which the first
passion had vanished through an hour of iteration.

"O God, give un back to me; O God, spare un; O kind God, give my li'l
bwoy back."

CHAPTER VII

GREY TWILIGHT

In the soft earth they laid him, "the little child whose heart had
fallen asleep," and from piling of a miniature mound, from a small brown
tumulus, now quite hid under primroses, violets, and the white anemones
of the woods, Will Blanchard and his mother slowly returned to Newtake.
He wore his black coat; she was also dressed in black; the solitary
mourning coach dragged slowly up the hill to the Moor, and elsewhere
another like it conveyed Mr. Lyddon homeward.

Neither mother nor son had any heart to speak. The man's soul was up in
arms; he had rebelled against his life, and since the death of his boy,
while Phoebe remained inert in her desolation and languished under a
mental and bodily paralysis wherein she had starved to death but for
those about her, he, on the contrary, found muscle and mind clamouring
for heroic movement. He was feverishly busy upon the farm, and ranged in
thought with a savage activity among the great concerns of men. His
ill-regulated mind, smarting under the blows of Chance, whirled from
that past transient wave of superstitious emotion into an opposite
extreme. Now he was ashamed of his weakness, and suffered convictions
proper to the narrowness of an immature intellect to overwhelm him. He
assured himself that his tribulations were not compatible with the
existence of a Supreme Being. Like poor humanity the wide world over,
his judgment became vitiated, his views distorted under the stroke of
personal sorrow, and, beneath the pressure of that gigantic egotism
which ever palsies the mind of man at sudden loss of what he holds
dearest upon earth, poor Blancha