s
the seas."

She kept the old gypsy at the farm; or, to speak more correctly, she
made the farm his headquarters. She assigned him the only bedroom he
would accept, viz., a cattle-shed, open on one side. She used often to
have him into her room when she was alone; she gave him some of her
husband's clothes, and made him wear a decent hat; by these means she
effaced, in some degree, his nationality, and then she compelled her
servants to call him "the foreign gent."

The foreign gent was very apt to disappear in fine weather, but rain
soon drove him back to her fireside, and hunger to her flesh-pots.

On the very day the foreign gent came to Meyrick's farm Lady Bassett
had a letter by post from Reginald.

"DEAR MAMMA--I am gone with the gypsies across the water. I am sorry to
leave you. You are the right sort: but they tormented me so with their
books and their dark rooms. It is very unfortunate to be a boy. When I
am a man, I shall be too old to be tormented, and then I will come
back.

"Your dutiful son,

"REGINALD."

Lady Bassett telegraphed Sir Charles, and he returned to Huntercombe,
looking old, sad, and worn.

Lady Bassett set herself to comfort and cheer him, and this was her
gentle office for many a long month.

She was the more fit for it, that her own health and spirits revived
the moment Reginald left the country with his friends the gypsies; the
color crept back to her cheek, her spirits revived, and she looked as
handsome, and almost as young, as when she married. She tasted
tranquillity. Year after year went by without any news of Reginald, and
the hope grew that he would never cross her threshold again, and
Compton be Sir Charles's heir without any more trouble.

CHAPTER XLI.

OUR story now makes a bold skip. Compton Bassett was fourteen years
old, a youth highly cultivated in mind and trained in body, but not
very tall, and rather effeminate looking, because he was so fair and
his skin so white.

For all that, he was one of the bowlers in the Wolcombe Eleven, whose
cricket-ground was the very meadow in which he had erst gathered
cowslips with Ruperta Bassett; and he had a canoe, which he carried to
adjacent streams, however narrow, and paddled it with singular skill
and vigor. A neighboring miller, suffering under drought, was heard to
say, "There ain't water enough to float a duck; nought can swim but the
dab-chicks and Muster Bassett."

He was also a pedestrian, and go