xceptional robustness against another than he. But the dead
father wanting to build a great race of men and women ruled.

Carinthia knelt at the cradle of a princeling gone from the rich repast
to his alternative kingdom.

'You will bring him over when he wakes,' she said to Madge. 'Mrs. Wythan
would like to see him every day. Martha can walk now.'

'She can walk and hold a child in her two arms, my lady,' said Madge.
'She expects miners popping up out of the bare ground when she sees no
goblins.'

'They!--they know him, they would not hurt him, they know my son,' her
mistress answered.

The population of the mines in revolt had no alarms for her. The works
were empty down below. Men sat by the wayside brooding or strolled in
groups, now and then loudly exercising their tongues; or they stood in
circle to sing hymns: melancholy chants of a melancholy time for all.

How would her father have acted by these men? He would have been among
them. Dissensions in his mine were vapours of a day. Lords behaved
differently. Carinthia fancied the people must regard their master as a
foreign wizard, whose power they felt, without the chance of making their
cry to him heard. She, too, dealt with a lord. It was now his wish for
her to leave the place where she had found some shreds of a home in the
thought of being useful. She was gathering the people's language; many of
their songs she could sing, and please them by singing to them. They were
not suspicious of her; at least, their women had open doors for her; the
men, if shy, were civil. She had only to go below, she was greeted in the
quick tones of their speech all along the street of the slate-roofs.

But none loved the castle, and she as little, saving the one room in it
where her boy lay. The grey of Welsh history knew a real castle beside
the roaring brook frequently a torrent. This was an eighteenth century
castellated habitation on the verge of a small wood midway up the height,
and it required a survey of numberless happy recollections to illumine
its walls or drape its chambers. The permanently lighted hearth of a dear
home, as in that forsaken unfavoured old white house of the wooded
Austrian crags, it had not. Rather it seemed a place waiting for an ill
deed to be done in it and stop all lighting of hearths thereafter.

Out on the turf of the shaven hills, her springy step dispersed any misty
fancies. Her short-winged hive set to work in her head as usual, buildin