coming toward
her, his form dark against the red sunset, Geoffrey Ripon.

He saw her at the same moment, and he took off his hat. She walked up to
him and offered him her hand.

"Miss Windsor, Maggie," he said as he grasped it.

"You received my message?" she asked, looking into his eyes.

"I did. Is it true?"

"I do not know," she answered, looking down at the river, which gleamed
below rosy with the sunset; a happy omen. "It depends--"

"Upon what?" asked Geoffrey, eagerly.

"Upon you, Geoffrey," she answered. "Did you not know it?" And the sun,
which just then disappeared over the Brookline hills, did not in his
circuit of the world look upon a happier pair than these two lovers,
clasped in each other's arms.

CHAPTER XXI.

NULLA VESTIGIA RETRORSUM.

So they were married, and the alliance between simple hearts and Norman
blood was complete. It came to pass before many months that the
millionaire, pleased, it may be, to find his homely patronymic
transmitted to his grand-child, bought back Ripon House from the
mortgagees and gave it to his son-in-law. Mr. Windsor knew it was the
secret desire of his daughter that Geoffrey should return to England and
devote himself to aiding his countrymen in their struggle for liberty.
But Geoffrey was too content with his own happiness and too appalled by
the confusion which still overspread his native land to evince much
enthusiasm in this regard. "Wait a little, Maggie," he said, and Maggie
was shrewd enough to understand that this was the better way to attain
her purpose. She remembered how her husband had broken his sword and
renounced fealty to the perjured King. Give Geoffrey time, and he would
work out his own salvation.

But while individuals wedded and were happy and begat children, and
while patient women tarried for God's word to awaken in their lovers'
hearts, the great world, which is never happy and which never waits,
rolled on remorselessly. England still knew perilous days, but the hope
of better things to come glimmered through the mists of evil rule.

The bulwark of the nation's safety in that hazardous time, as history
well knows, was Richard Lincoln; and though we who have faith that God
is ever working for man's good, know that human nature must in the end
evolve into higher grades of truth and power, and that even the
sublimest soul is but a cipher in the eternal scale; yet England had
need of a rare spirit in that time of her sore distr