enjoyment of his own jokes. It was not till he
and Sarah were well out of the little town,
and away by themselves on the great moor
which stretched beyond it, that his manner
altered and his talk ceased altogether. After
walking on in silence for some little time,
with his niece's arm in his, he suddenly
stopped, looked her earnestly and kindly in
the face, and laid his hand on her's.

"There is yet one thing more I want to
ask you, my child," he said. "The journey
has put it out of my head, but it has been in
my heart all the time. When we leave this
place of Porthgenna, and get back to my
house, you will not go away? you will not
leave Uncle Joseph again? Are you in
service still, Sarah? Are you not your own
master yet?"

"I was in service a few days since," she
answered." But I am free now. I have lost
my place."

"Aha! You have lost your place; and
why?"

"Because I would not hear an innocent
person unjustly blamed. Because—"

She checked herself. But the few words
she had said were spoken with such a
suddenly heightened colour, and with such an
extraordinary emphasis and resolution of
tone, that the old man opened his eyes as
widely as possible, and looked at his niece in
undisguised astonishment.

"So! so! so!" he exclaimed. "What!
You have had a quarrel, Sarah?"

"Hush! Don't ask me any more questions
now!" she pleaded earnestly. "I am too
anxious and too frightened to answer. Uncle!
this is Porthgenna Moor—this is the road I
passed over, sixteen years ago, when I ran
away to you. O! let us get on, pray let us
get on! I can't think of anything now but
the house we are so near, and the risk we
are going to run."

They went on quickly, in silence. Half-an-hour's
rapid walking brought them to the
highest elevation on the moor, and gave the
whole western prospect grandly to their
view.

There below them was the dark, lonesome,
spacious structure of Porthgenna Tower,
with the sunlight already stealing round
towards the windows of the west front! There
was the path winding away to it gracefully
over the brown moor, in curves ot dazzling
white! There, lower down, was the solitary
old church, with the peaceful burial-ground
nestling by its side. There, lower still, were
the little scattered roofs of the fishermen's
cottages! And there, beyond all, was the
changeless glory of the sea, with its old
seething lines of white foam, with the old
winding margin of its yellow shores! Sixteen
long years—such years of sorrow, such
years of suffering, such years of change,
counted by the pulses of the living heart!—
had passed over the dead tranquillity of
Porthgenna, and had altered it as little as if
they had all been contained within the lapse
of a single day!

The moments when the spirit within us is
most deeply stirred, are almost invariably
the moments also when its outward
manifestations are hardest to detect. Our own
thoughts rise above us; our own feelings lie
deeper than we can reach. How seldom
words can help us, when their help is most
wanted! How often our tears are dried up
when we most long for them to relieve us!
Was there ever a strong emotion in this
world that could adequately express its
own strength? What third person brought
face to face with the old man and his niece,
as they now stood together on the moor,
would have suspected, to look at them, that
the one was contemplating the landscape with
nothing more than a stranger's curiosity, and
that the other was viewing it through the
recollections of half a life-time? The eyes of
both were dry, the tongues of both were silent,
the faces of both were set with equal attention
towards the prospect. Even between
themselves there was no real sympathy, no
intelligible appeal from one spirit to the other.
The old man's quiet admiration of the view was
not more briefly and readily expressed, when
they moved forward and spoke to each other,
than the customary phrases of assent by
which his niece replied to the little that he
said. How many moments there are in this
mortal life, when, with all our boasted powers
of speech, the words of our vocabulary
treacherously fade out, and the page presents
nothing to us but the sight of a perfect
blank!

Slowly descending the slope of the moor,
the uncle and niece drew nearer and nearer
to Porthgenna Tower. They were within a
quarter of an hour's walk of the house, when
Sarah stopped at a place where a second
path intersected the main foot-track which
they had hitherto been following. On the
left hand, as they now stood, the cross-path
ran on until it was lost to the eye in the
expanse of the moor. On the right hand, it
led straight to the church.

"What do we stop for now?" asked Uncle
Joseph, looking first in one direction and then
in the other.

"Would you mind waiting for me here a
little while, uncle? I can't pass the church-
path——" she paused, in some trouble how
to express herself——"without wishing (as
I don't know what may happen after we get
to the house), without wishing to see—to look
at something——" she stopped again, and
turned her face wistfully towards the church.
The tears which had never wetted her eyes
at the first view of Porthgenna, were
beginning to rise in them now.

Uncle Joseph's natural delicacy warned
him that it would be best to abstain from
asking her for any explanations. "Go you
where you like, to see what you like," he
said, patting her on the shoulder. "I shall