"William!" he said at last, gently; "William!" and the tears rolled down
his furrowed cheeks; "my son!" but that son was gone--the old man
listened for reply--none came. "He has left me--poor William!--we shall
never meet again;" and he sank once more on the old tombstone, dumb,
rigid, motionless--an image of Time himself in his own domain of Graves.
The dog crept closer to his master, and licked his hand. Philip stood
for a moment in thoughtful silence: his exclamation of despair had been
answered as by his better angel. There was a being more miserable than
himself; and the Accursed would have envied the Bereaved!

The twilight had closed in; the earliest star--the star of Memory and
Love, the Hesperus hymned by every poet since the world began--was fair
in the arch of heaven, as Philip quitted the spot, with a spirit more
reconciled to the future, more softened, chastened, attuned to gentle and
pious thoughts than perhaps ever yet had made his soul dominant over the
deep and dark tide of his gloomy passions. He went thence to a
neighbouring sculptor, and paid beforehand for a plain tablet to be
placed above the grave he had left. He had just quitted that shop, in
the same street, not many doors removed from the house in which his
mother had breathed her last. He was pausing by a crossing, irresolute
whether to repair at once to the home assigned to Sidney, or to seek some
shelter in town for that night, when three men who were on the opposite
side of the way suddenly caught sight of him.

"There he is--there he is! Stop, sir!--stop!"

Philip heard these words, looked up, and recognised the voice and the
person of Mr. Plaskwith; the bookseller was accompanied by Mr. Plimmins,
and a sturdy, ill-favoured stranger.