THE Dutch clock in the corner struck Ten, when the Carrier sat down by his fireside. So troubled and grief-worn, that he seemed to scare the Cuckoo, who, having cut his ten melodious¹ announcements as short as possible, plunged² back into the Moorish³ Palace again, and clapped his little door behind him, as if the unwonted spectacle were too much for his feelings. If the little Haymaker had been armed with the sharpest of scythes⁵, and had cut at every stroke into the Carrier's heart, he never could have gashed⁶ and wounded it, as Dot had done. It was a heart so full of love for her; so bound up and held together by innumerable threads of winning remembrance, spun⁷ from the daily working of her many qualities of endearment⁸; it was a heart in which she had enshrined herself so gently and so closely; a heart so single and so earnest in its Truth, so strong in right, so weak in wrong; that it could cherish neither passion nor revenge at first, and had only room to hold the broken image of its Idol⁹. But, slowly, slowly, as the Carrier sat brooding on his hearth¹⁰, now cold and dark, other and fiercer thoughts began to rise within him, as an angry wind comes rising in the night. The Stranger was beneath his outraged¹¹ roof. Three steps would take him to his chamber-door. One blow would beat it in. 'You might do murder before you know it,' Tackleton had said. How could it be murder, if he gave the villain¹² time to grapple with him hand to hand! He was the younger man. It was an ill-timed thought, bad for the dark mood of his mind. It was an angry thought,

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