word to the boy.

The other two had the meal chest to guard and each other to watch.

He was left to feel the full influence of the grey moorland life. The dismal stillness of the house, the lengthy prayers and repellent faces, drove him out of doors; the silence and solitude of the fells, which even in sunshine, when the peewits screamed and flew in circles, and the sky was blue above, were dreary and lonesome, scared him back to the house. Once a week the family went four miles to a meeting-house, where Luke Gridley and a Bradford weaver preached by turns. But this was the only break in his life, if a break it could be called. In Simon's creed boyhood and youth held no place.

Rumors of trouble and war, moreover, diverted from the child some of the attention which the elder people might otherwise have paid him. Sir Marmaduke Langdale's riders, scouting in front of the army which Duke Hamilton had raised in Scotland, were reported to be no farther off than Appleby. Any day they might descend on Settle, or a handful of them pass the farmstead, and levy contributions in the old high-handed Royalist fashion. Simon and Luke, wearing grimmer faces than usual, cleaned their pikes, and got out the old buff-coats which had lain by since Naseby, and held long conferences with their friends at Settle. The boy, aimless and without companions, acquired a habit of wandering in and out during these preparations, and more than once his pale face and dwarfish form appearing suddenly in their midst gave Luke Gridley, who was apt to weave what he saw into the unsubstantial texture of his dreams, a start beyond the ordinary.

"Who is that child?" he said one day, looking after him with a troubled face. "There used to be no child here."

"The child?" Simon exclaimed, glancing at him impatiently. "What has the child to do with us? Let it be."

"Let it be?" said the other, softly. "Ay, for a season. For a season. Yet remember that it is written, 'A child shall discover the matter.'"

"Tush!" Simon answered angrily. "This is folly. Isn't it written also, resist the devil, and he will fly from you!"

"Ay, the devil--and his angels," Luke repeated gently.

Simon shrugged his shoulders. Nevertheless he too, when he next met the lad wandering aimlessly about, looked at him with new eyes. Though he was subject to no active delusions himself, he had a strong and superstitious respect for his brother's fantasies. He began to watch the boy about, and surprising him one day in a solitary place in the act of forming patterns on the turf with stones, noted with a feeling of dread that these took the shape of a circle and a triangle, with other cabalistic figures as odd as they were unfamiliar. He would not at another time have given such a trifle a second thought. But we see things through the glasses of our own prepossessions. The morose and rugged fanatic, who feared no odds, and whom no persecution could bend, looked askance at the child playing unconsciously before him, looked dubiously at the grey moor strewn with monoliths, and finally with a shiver turned and walked homewards.

CHAPTER III.

LANGDALE'S HORSE.

It was well he did so, for the fiery cross had chosen that moment to arrive; Simon found his household waiting for him at the foldgate, and with them a red-faced man from Settle, who had ridden across the fells with the news that Langdale's people were harrying the place. Before the messenger had had time to come to details, the Puritan was himself again. The light of battle gleamed in his sober eyes, his face grew hard as his native rock. Knowing that he was looked for with anxiety, and that at the rendezvous few would be more welcome, he lost not a moment, but quickly, yet without hurry, fetched his pike and coat, girt on his pistols, and filled his bandoliers. Luke, who had had some minutes the start of him, and whose eyes burned with a sombre enthusiasm, showed himself equally forward. When the two stood ready at the gate, then, and then only, they discovered that the third brother had no intention of accompanying them. He stood back on the inner side of the wall with a frown on his pale face, his attitude a curious mixture of shrinking and resolution.

"Come, man, be quick!" Simon cried sharply. "What are you waiting for?"

"I'm not coming, Simon," was the reply.

"Not coming?"

"Some one must stay and take care of the place," the butler answered, wiping his forehead. "I'll stay. Your wife will need some one."

"Fool! what can one man do here?" the Puritan retorted fiercely. "Come, I say. This is no time for loitering when the work calls us."

Gridley shook his head and moistened his lips with his tongue. "I'm not a fighting man," he muttered feebly.

For a moment the elder brother glared at him, as though he were minded to cross the fence and strike him down. Fortunately, however, Simon found a vent for his passion as effectual and more characteristic. "If you do not fight, you do not eat," he said coldly. "At any rate in my house. Mistress," he continued to his wife, "see that my orders are obeyed. Give that craven neither bit nor sup until I come again. If he will not fight he shall not feed!"

And with that he went.

When little Jack came back to the house an hour later, and crept shyly into the kitchen, as his manner was, he found it empty. The light was beginning to wane, and the coming evening already filled the corners of the gaunt, silent room, in which not even a clock ticked, with shadows. The boy stood awhile, looking about him and listening in the stillness for any movement in the inner room, or on the floor above. Hearing none, he went outside in a kind of panic; but there too he found no one. Still, the light gave him courage to re-enter and mount the stairs. He called "Gridley!" again and again, but no one answered. He tried Luke's room; it was empty. On this the lad was about to fly again in a worse panic than before--for the loneliness of the house might have appalled an older heart than his--when the sound of footsteps relieved his fears. He stole to the window, and saw the butler and Mistress Gridley come round the corner of the house, the former carrying a spade on his shoulder.

Jack wondered timidly what they had been about with the spade, and where Simon and Luke were; but naturally he got no explanation, and was glad to escape from the grim looks with which they greeted him. It was time for the evening meal, and the woman set it on, and gave him his share as usual. The butler, however, he saw with surprise took no part in it, but sat at a distance with a scowl on his face, and neither ate nor drank. On the other hand, Mistress Gridley ate more than usual. Indeed, he had never seen her in better appetite or spirits, She rallied her companion, too, on his abstinence so pleasantly and with so much good-temper, that the child was quite carried away by her humor, and went to bed in better spirits than had been his since the beginning of his life at Malham.

In the morning it was the same, with the exception that Gridley looked strangely pale about the cheeks. Again he took no share of the meal, but in the middle of breakfast he came up to the table in an odd, violent fashion, falling back only when Mistress Gridley snatched up a knife, and made a playful thrust at him. She laughed at the same time, but the laugh was not musical, and the child, detecting a false note in it, grew puzzled. Even for him the scene had lost its humor. The man's