word in this world, sir, there's another to reckon with."

"And meanwhile you're on pins and needles to be off to your wife's bedside. Very well, man—drink up your cider; and many thanks for your good wishes!"

As Mr. Benny hurried towards the wicket-gate and the street leading down to the ferry, he caught sight, across the hedge, of two children seated together in a corner of the garden on the step of a summer arbour, and paused to wave a hand to them.

They were a girl and a boy—the girl about eight years old and the boy a year or so younger—and the pair were occupied in making a garland such as children carry about on May-morning—two barrel-hoops fixed crosswise and mounted on a pole. The girl had laid the pole across her lap, and was binding the hoops with ferns and wild hyacinths, wallflowers, and garden tulips, talking the while with the boy, who bent his head close by hers and seemed to peer into the flowers. But in fact he was blind.

"You're late!" the girl called to Mr. Benny. At the sound of her voice, the boy too waved a hand to him.

"It's your grandfather's birthday, and I've been drinking his health." He beckoned them over to the hedge. "And it's another person's birthday," he announced mysteriously.

"Bless the man! you don't tell me you've gone and got another!" exclaimed the girl.

Mr. Benny nodded, no whit abashed.

"Boy or girl?"

"Boy."

"What is he like?" asked the boy. His blindness came from some defect of the optic nerve, and did not affect the beauty of his eyes, which were curiously reflective (as though they looked inwards), and in colour a deep violet-grey.

"I hadn't much time to take stock of him this morning," Mr. Benny confessed; "but the doctor said he was a fine one." He nodded at the garland. "Birthday present for your grandfather?" he asked.

"Grandfather doesn't bother himself about us," the girl answered. "Besides, what would he do with it?"

"I know—I know. It's better be unmannerly than troublesome, as they say; and you'd like to please him, but feel too shy to offer it. That's like me. I had it on my tongue just now to ask him to stand godfather—the child's birthday being the same as his own. 'Twas the honour of it I wanted; but like as not (thought I) he'll set it down that I'm fishing for something else, and when it didn't strike him to offer I felt I couldn't mention it."

"I'll ask him, if you like."

"Not on any account! No, please, you mustn't! Promise me."

"Very well."

"I oughtn't to have mentioned it, but,"—Mr. Benny rubbed the back of his head. "You don't know how it is—no, of course you wouldn't; somehow, when a child's born, I want to be talking all day."

"Like a hen. Well, run along home, and some day you shall ask us to tea with it."

But Mr. Benny had reached the wicket. It slammed behind him, and he ran down the street to the ferry at a round trot. He might have spared his haste, for he had to cool his heels for a good ten minutes on the slipway, and fill up the time in telling his news to half a dozen workmen gathered there and awaiting the boat. Old Nicky Vro, the ferryman, had pulled the same leisurable stroke for forty years now, and was not to be hurried.

The workmen were carpenters, all engaged upon the new schoolhouse above the hill, and returning from their day's job. They discussed the building as Nicky Vro tided them over. Its fittings, they agreed, were something out of the common.

"'Tis the old man's whim," said one. "He's all for education now, and the latest improvements. 'Capability'—that's his word."

"A poor lookout it'll be for Aunt Butson and her Infant School."

"He'll offer her the new place, maybe," it was suggested.

But all laughed at this. "What? with his notions? He's a darned sight more likely to offer her Nicky's job, here!"

Nicky smiled complacently in his half-witted way. "That's a joke, too," said he. He knew himself to be necessary to the ferry.

He pulled on—still with the same digging stroke which he could not have altered for a fortune—while his passengers discussed Rosewarne and Rosewarne's ways.

"Tis a hungry gleaning where he've a-reaped," said the man who had spoken of capability; "but I don't blame the old Greek—not I. 'Do or be done, miss doing and be done for'—that's the world's motto nowadays; and if I hadn't learnt it for myself, I've a son in America to write it home. Here we be all in a heap, and the lucky one levers himself a-top."

Mr. Benny said good-night to them on the landing-slip, and broke into a trot for home.

"'Tisn't true," he kept repeating to himself, almost fiercely for so mild a little man. "'Tisn't true, whatever it sounds. There's another world; and in this one—don't I know it?—there's love, love, love!"

CHAPTER II.

FATHERS AND CHILDREN.

John Rosewarne fetched his hat and staff from the hall, and started on his customary stroll around the farm-buildings, with the small greyhound trotting daintily at his heels.

The lands of Hall march with those of a far larger estate, to which they once belonged, and of which Hall itself had once been the chief seat. The house—a grey stone building with two wings and a heavy porch midway between them—dated from 1592, and had received its shape of a capital E in compliment to Queen Elizabeth. King Charles himself had lodged in it for a day during the Civil War, and while inspecting the guns on a terraced walk above the harbour, had narrowly escaped a shot fired across from the town where Essex's troops lay in force. The shot killed a poor fisherman beside him, and His Majesty that afternoon gave thanks for his own preservation in the private chapel of Hall. In those days, the porch and all the main windows looked seaward upon this chapel across half an acre of green-sward, but the Rosewarnes had since converted the lawn into a farmyard and the shrine into a cow-byre. Above it ran a line of tall elms screening a lane used by the farm-carts, and above this again a great field of arable rounded itself against the sky.

From the top of Parc-an-hal—so the field was named—the eye travelled over a goodly prospect: sea and harbour; wide stretches of cultivated land intersected by sunken woodlands which marked the winding creeks of the river; other woodlands yet more distant, embowering the great mansion of Damelioc; the purple rise of a down capped by a monument commemorating ancient battles. The scene held old and deeply written meanings for Rosewarne, as he gazed over it in the descending twilight—meanings he had spent his life to acquire, and other meanings born with him in his blood.

Once upon a time there lived a wicked nobleman. He owned Damelioc, and had also for his pleasure the house and estate of Hall, whence his family had moved to their lordlier mansion two generations before his birth. Being exiled to the country from the Court of Queen Anne, he cast about for some civilised way of passing the time, and one day, as he lounged at church in his great pew, his eye fell on Rachel Rosewarne, a gipsy-looking girl, sitting under the gallery. This Rachel's father was a fisherman, tall of stature, who planted himself one night in the road as my lord galloped homeward to Damelioc. The horse shied, and the rider was thrown. Rosewarne picked him up, dusted his lace coat carefully, and led him aside into this very field of Parc-an-hal. No one knows what talk they held there, but on his lordship's dying, in 1712, of wounds received in a duel in Hyde Park, Rachel Rosewarne produced a deed, which the widow's lawyers did not contest, and entered Hall as its mistress, with her son Charles— then five years old.

Rachel Rosewarne died in 1760 at the age of seventy-six, leaving a grim reputation, which survived for another hundred years in the talk of the countryside. While she lived, her grip on the estate never