A thin little twig of a man, he was still animated, at times, by the
power of a strenuous and dauntless spirit. His hair, brushed straight
back from the overtopping forehead, had grown snowy white, and the
eager, delicate face beneath wore a strange pathos from the very
fineness of its nervously netted lines. Not many years after his wife's
death, the parson had shown some wandering of the wits; yet his
disability, like his loss, had been mercifully veiled from him. He took
calmly to his bed, perhaps through sheer lack of interest in life, and
it became his happy invention that he was "not feeling well," from one
day to another, but that, on the next Sunday, he should rise and
preach. He seemed like an unfortunate and uncomplaining child, and the
village folk took pride in him as something all their own; a pride
enhanced by his habit, in this weak estate, of falling back into the
homely ways of speech he had used long ago when he was a boy "on the
farm." In his wife's day, he had stood in the pulpit above them, and
expounded scriptural lore in academic English; now he lapsed into their
own rude phrasing, and seemed to rest content in a tranquil certainty
that nothing could be better than Tiverton ways and Tiverton's homely
speech.

"Dorcas," he repeated, with all a child's delight in his own
cleverness, "you've had somebody here. I heard ye!"

Dorcas folded the sheet back over the quilt, and laid her hand on his
hair, with all the tenderness of the strong when they let themselves
brood over the weak.

"Only Phoebe, on her way home," she answered, gently. "The doctor
visited her school to-day. She thinks he may drop in to see you
to-night. I guess he give her to understand so."