It gave her perpetual pain: and yet that pain was a perpetual joy--a perpetual remembrance of him, and of that walk with him from Tolchard's farm.
Mary loved her--wanted to treat her as an equal--to call her sister: but Grace drew back lovingly, but humbly, from all advances; for she had divined Mary's secret with the quick eye of woman; she saw how Mary grew daily paler, thinner, sadder, and knew for whom she mourned.

Be it so; Mary had a right to him, and she had none.
* * * * * And where was Tom Thurnall all the while?
No man could tell.
Mark inquired; Lord Minchampstead inquired; great personages who had need of him at home and abroad inquired: but all in vain.
A few knew, and told Lord Minchampstead, who told Mark, in confidence, that he had been heard of last in the Circassian mountains, about Christmas, 1854: but since then all was blank.

He had vanished into the infinite unknown.
Mark swore that he would come home some day: but two full years were past, and Tom came not.
The old man never seemed to regret him; never mentioned his name after a while.
"Mark," he said once, "remember David.

Why weep for the child?
I shall go to him, but he will not come to me." None knew, meanwhile, why the old man needed not to talk of Tom to his friends and neighbours; it was because he and Grace never talked of anything else.
* * * * * So they had lived, and so they had waited, till that week before last Christmas-day, when Mellot and Stangrave made their appearance in Whitbury, and became Mark Armsworth's guests.
The week slipped on.

Stangrave hunted on alternate days; and on the others went with Claude, who photographed (when there was sun to do it with) Stangrave End, and Whitford Priory, interiors and exteriors; not forgetting the Stangrave monuments in Whitbury church; and sat, too, for many a pleasant hour with the good Doctor, who took to him at once, as all men did.