still the amateur of clocks murmured his placid lore. It was rather more
than old nerves could stand.

"The dog," I broke in upon the stream of erudition. "Surely, Mr.
Merivale--"

"Willy Woolly?" He looked down, and the faithful one withdrew himself
from his vision long enough to lick the master hand. "Does he
disturb you?"

"Oh, no," I answered, a little confused. "I only thought--it seemed that
he is uneasy about something."

"There are finer sensibilities than we poor humans have," said my host
gravely.

"Then you have noticed how he watches and follows?"

"He is always like that. Always, since."

His "since" was one of the strangest syllables that ever came to my
ears. It implied nothing to follow. It was finality's self.

"It is"--I sought a word--"interesting and curious," I concluded lamely,
feeling how insufficient the word was.

"She comes back to him," said my host simply.

No need to ask of whom he spoke. The pronoun was as final and definitive
as his "since." Never have I heard such tenderness as he gave to its
utterance. Nor such desolation as dimmed his voice when he added:

"She never comes back to me."

That evening he spoke no more of her. Yet I felt that I had been
admitted to an intimacy. And, as the habit grew upon me thereafter of
dropping in to listen to the remote, restful, unworldly quaintnesses of
his philosophy, fragments, dropped here and there, built up the outline
of the tragedy which had left him stranded in our little backwater of
quiet. She whom he had cherished since they were boy and girl together,
had died in the previous winter. She had formed the whole circle of his
existence within which he moved, attended by Willy Woolly, happily
gathering his troves. Her death had left him not so much alone as alien
in the world. He was without companionship except that of Willy Woolly,
without interest except that of his timepieces, and without hope except
that of rejoining her. Once he emerged from a long spell of musing, to
say in a tone of indescribable conviction:

"I suppose I was the happiest man in the world."

Any chance incident or remark might turn his thought and speech,
unconscious of the transition, from his favorite technicalities back to
the past. Some comment of mine upon a specimen of that dismal songster,
the cuckoo clock, which stood on his mantel, had started him into one of
his learned expositions.

"The first cuckoo clock, as you are doubtless aware, sir