such an anguish of grief that the
mother rose and followed him.

John went to the door and locked it, almost with a sort of impatience;
then came back and stood by his darling, alone. Me he never saw--no,
nor anything in the world except that little face, even in death so
strangely like his own. The face which had been for eleven years the
joy of his heart, the very apple of his eye.

For a long time he remained gazing, in a stupor of silence; then,
sinking on his knee, he stretched out his arms across the bed, with a
bitter cry:

"Come back to me, my darling, my first-born! Come back to me, Muriel,
my little daughter--my own little daughter!"

But thou wert with the angels, Muriel--Muriel!

CHAPTER XXIX

We went home, leaving all that was mortal of our darling sleeping at
Enderley, underneath the snows.

For twelve years after then, we lived at Longfield; in such unbroken,
uneventful peace, that looking back seems like looking back over a
level sea, whose leagues of tiny ripples make one smooth glassy plain.

Let me recall--as the first wave that rose, ominous of change--a
certain spring evening, when Mrs. Halifax and I were sitting, as was
our wont, under the walnut-tree. The same old walnut-tree, hardly a
bough altered, though many of its neighbours and kindred had grown from
saplings into trees--even as some of us had grown from children almost
into young men.

"Edwin is late home from Norton Bury," said Ursula.

"So is his father."

"No--this is just John's time. Hark! there are the carriage-wheels!"

For Mr. Halifax, a prosperous man now, drove daily to and from his
mills, in as tasteful an equipage as any of the country gentry between
here and Enderley.

His wife went down to the stream to meet him, as usual, and they came
up the field-path together.

Both were changed from the John and Ursula of whom I last wrote. She,
active and fresh-looking still, but settling into that fair largeness
which is not unbecoming a lady of middle-age, he, inclined to a slight
stoop, with the lines of his face more sharply defined, and the hair
wearing away off his forehead up to the crown. Though still not a grey
thread was discernible in the crisp locks at the back, which
successively five little ones had pulled, and played with, and nestled
in; not a sign of age, as yet, in "father's curls."

As soon as he had spoken to me, he looked round as usual for his
children, and asked if the boys and Maud wo