d in a low voice.
'Happy! and content?'

'_Yes_,' Lucy replied proudly. 'And _you_, Mary, you are happy now?'

'Blest with the tender care of my husband. _Yes_; but, Lucy, I bring him
but a poor reward for all his patient love.'

'Nay, he does not think so, I'll warrant,' Lucy said. 'You will soon be
well and hearty in your native air, and the colour will come back to your
cheeks and the brightness to your eyes.'

'To rival yours, dear child! Nay, you forget how time, as well as sickness
and sorrow, have left its mark on me.'

'And Ambrose?' Lucy asked. 'You have comfort in him?'

'Yes,' Mary said. 'Yes, but, dear heart, the vanished days of childhood
return not. Ambrose is old for his sixteen years; and, although dear, dear
as ever, I am prone to look back on those days at Ford Manor, when he was
mine, all mine, before the severance from me changed him.'

'Sure he is not a Papist now?' Lucy said. 'I trust not.'

'Nay, he is not professedly a Papist, but the teaching of those four years
sowed seed. Yet he loves me, and is a dutiful son to me, and to his--his
new father. I ought to be satisfied.'

Little Philip now turned in his cradle, awoke by the entrance of the two
brothers and Ambrose, who had been to the stables to see that the grooms
and horses were well cared for.

Lucy raised Philip in her arms, and Mary said,--

'Ay! give him to me, sweet boy. See, Ambrose, here is your cousin; nay, I
might say your brother, for it is a double tie between you.'

The tall stripling looked down on the little morsel of humanity with a
puzzled expression.

'He is very small, methinks,' he said.

This roused Lucy's maternal vanity.

'Small, forsooth! Do you expect a babe of eight months to be a giant. He is
big enow for my taste and his father's. Too big at times, I vow, for he is
a weight to carry.'

Ambrose felt he had made a mistake, and hastened to add,--

'He has wondrous large eyes;' and then he bent over his mother and said,
'You should be resting in your own chamber, mother.'

'Yes; well spoken, my boy,' Humphrey said. 'Mary is not as hearty as I
could desire,' he added, turning to George. 'Maybe Lucy will take her to
her chamber, and forgive her if she does not come to sup in the hall.'

Lucy gave little Philip to his father, who held him in awkward fashion,
till the nurse came to the rescue and soothed his faint wailing by the
usual nonsense words of endearment which then, as now, nurses seem to
cons