That would be a jest indeed!"

More he thought not about the matter; for now the door was opened, and
an elderly woman appeared on the threshold, peering into the dusk to
discover who it might be that had intruded on her premises, and was
standing in the shadow of her tree. It was Ralph Cranfield's mother.
Pass we over their greeting, and leave the one to her joy and the
other to his rest,--if quiet rest be found.

But when morning broke, he arose with a troubled brow; for his sleep
and his wakefulness had alike been full of dreams. All the fervor was
rekindled with which he had burned of yore to unravel the threefold
mystery of his fate. The crowd of his early visions seemed to have
awaited him beneath his mother's roof, and thronged riotously around
to welcome his return. In the well-remembered chamber--on the pillow
where his infancy had slumbered--he had passed a wilder night than
ever in an Arab tent, or when he had reposed his head in the ghastly
shades of a haunted forest. A shadowy maid had stolen to his bedside,
and laid her finger on the scintillating heart; a hand of flame had
glowed amid the darkness, pointing downward to a mystery within the
earth; a hoary sage had waved his prophetic wand, and beckoned the
dreamer onward to a chair of state. The same phantoms, though fainter
in the daylight, still flitted about the cottage, and mingled among
the crowd of familiar faces that were drawn thither by the news of
Ralph Cranfield's return, to bid him welcome for his mother's sake.
There they found him, a tall, dark, stately man, of foreign aspect,
courteous in demeanor and mild of speech, yet with an abstracted eye,
which seemed often to snatch a glance at the invisible.

Meantime the Widow Cranfield went bustling about the house full of joy