wept.

"Dear Mrs. Hawker," said Frank, coming up and taking her hand, "if you
are in trouble, I know well that my visit is well timed. Where trouble
and sorrow are, there is my place, there lies my work. In prosperity my
friends sometimes forget me, but my hope and prayer is, that when
affliction and disaster come, I may be with them. You do not want me
now; but when you do, God grant I may be with you! Remember my words."

She remembered them well.

Frank made an excuse to go out, and Mary, crying bitterly, went into
her bedroom. When she was gone, the Major, who had been standing by the
window, said,--

"My dear wife, that boy of hers is aggravating her. Don't be too hard
upon her."

"My dear husband," said Mrs. Buckley, "I have no patience with her, to
welcome an old friend, whom she has not seen for nearly twenty years,
in that manner! It is too provoking."

"You see, my love," said the Major, "that her nerves have been very
much shaken by misfortune, and at times she is really not herself."

"And I tell you what, mother dear," said Sam, "Charles Hawker is going
on very badly. I tell you, in the strictest confidence, mind, that he
has not behaved in a very gentlemanlike way in one particular, and if
he was anyone else but who he is, I should have very little to say to
him."

"Well, my dear husband and son," said Mrs. Buckley, "I will go in and
make the AMENDE to her. Sam, go and see after the Dean."

Sam went out, and saw Frank across the yard playing with the dogs. He
was going towards him, when a man entering the yard suddenly came up
and spoke to him.

It was William Lee--grown older, and less wildlooking, since we saw him
first at midnight on Dartmoor, but a striking person still. His hair
had become grizzled, but that was the only sign of age he showed. There
was still the same vigour of motion, the same expression of enormous
strength about him as formerly; the principal change was in his face.
Eighteen years of honest work, among people who in time, finding his
real value, had got to treat him more as a friend than a servant, had
softened the old expression of reckless ferocity into one of
good-humoured independence. And Tom Troubridge, no careless observer of
men, had said once to Major Buckley, that he thought his face grew each
year more like what it must have been when a boy. A bold flight of
fancy for Tom, but, like all else he said, true.

Such was William Lee, as he stopped Sam in the ya