the soft
woman reflected--Berry ascended to her and delivered the news in pompous
tones and wheedling gestures. "The best word you've spoke for many a
day," says she, and leaves him unfee'd, in an attitude, to hurry and pour
bliss into Lucy's ears.

"Lord be praised!" she entered the adjoining room exclaiming, "we're got
to be happy at last. They men have come to their senses. I could cry to
your Virgin and kiss your Cross, you sweet!"

"Hush!" Lucy admonished her, and crooned over the child on her knees. The
tiny open hands, full of sleep, clutched; the large blue eyes started
awake; and his mother, all trembling and palpitating, knowing, but
thirsting to hear it, covered him with her tresses, and tried to still
her frame, and rocked, and sang low, interdicting even a whisper from
bursting Mrs. Berry.

Richard had come. He was under his father's roof, in the old home that
had so soon grown foreign to him. He stood close to his wife and child.
He might embrace them both: and now the fulness of his anguish and the
madness of the thing he had done smote the young man: now first he tasted
hard earthly misery.

Had not God spoken to him in the tempest? Had not the finger of heaven
directed him homeward? And he had come: here he stood: congratulations
were thick in his ears: the cup of happiness was held to him, and he was
invited to drink of it. Which was the dream? his work for the morrow, or
this? But for a leaden load that he felt like a bullet in his breast, he
might have thought the morrow with death sitting on it was the dream.
Yes; he was awake. Now first the cloud of phantasms cleared away: he
beheld his real life, and the colours of true human joy: and on the
morrow perhaps he was to close his eyes on them. That leaden bullet
dispersed all unrealities.

They stood about him in the hall, his father, Lady Blandish, Mrs. Doria,
Adrian, Ripton; people who had known him long. They shook his hand: they
gave him greetings he had never before understood the worth of or the
meaning. Now that he did they mocked him. There was Mrs. Berry in the
background bobbing, there was Martin Berry bowing, there was Tom Bakewell
grinning. Somehow he loved the sight of these better.

"Ah, my old Penelope!" he said, breaking through the circle of his
relatives to go to her. "Tom! how are you?"

"Bless ye, my Mr, Richard," whimpered Mrs. Berry, and whispered, rosily,
"all's agreeable now. She's waiting up in bed for ye, like a new-