but he still spoke not.

Merle looked aghast at that obstinate silence. At length, but very
slowly, as the warning bell summoned him and Sir Isaac to their several
places in the train, Waife found voice. "So you too, you too desert and
despise me! God's will be done!" He moved away,--spiritless, limping,
hiding his face as well as he could. The porter took the dog from him,
to thrust it into one of the boxes reserved for such four-footed
passengers.

Waife thus parted from his last friend--I mean the dog--looked after Sir
Isaac wistfully, and crept into a third-class carriage, in which luckily
there was no one else. Suddenly Merle jumped in, snatched his hand, and
pressed it tightly.

"I don't despise, I don't turn my back on you: whenever you and the
little one want a home and a friend, come to Kit Merle as before, and
I'll bite my tongue out if I ask any more questions of you; I'll ask the
stars instead."

The Cobbler had but just time to splutter out these comforting words and
redescend the carriage, when the train put itself into movement, and the
lifelike iron miracle, fuming, hissing, and screeching, bore off to
London its motley convoy of human beings, each passenger's heart a
mystery to the other, all bound the same road, all wedged close within
the same whirling mechanism; what a separate and distinct world in each!
Such is Civilization! How like we are one to the other in the mass! how
strangely dissimilar in the abstract!