ame they bore.
Southminster lay in the Trent Valley, so the travellers would start
together, and Lucilla would be dropped on the way. In the cedar parlour,
Owen's black knapsack lay open on the floor, and Lucilla was doing the
last office in her power for him, and that a sad one, furnishing the
Russia-leather housewife with the needles, silk, thread, and worsted for
his own mendings when he should be beyond the reach of the womankind who
cared for him.

He sat resting his head on his hand, watching her in silence, till she
was concluding her work. Then he said, 'Give me a bit of silk,' turned
his back on her, and stood up, doing something by the light of the lamp.
She was kneeling over the knapsack, and did not see what he was about,
till she found his hand on her head, and heard the scissors close, when
she perceived that he had cut off one of her pale, bright ringlets, and
saw his pocket-book open, and within it a thick, jet-black tress, and one
scanty, downy tuft of baby hair. She made no remark; but the tears came
dropping, as she packed; and, with a sudden impulse to give him the thing
above all others precious to her, she pulled from her bosom a locket,
hung from a slender gold chain, and held it to him--

'Owen, will you have this?'

'Whose? My father's?'

'And my mother's. He gave it to me when he went to Nice.'

Owen took it and looked at it thoughtfully.

'No, Lucy,' he said; 'I would not take it from you on any account. You
have always been his faithful child.'

'Mind you tell me if any one remembers him in Canada,' said Lucilla,
between relief and disappointment, restoring her treasure to the place it
had never left before. 'You will find out whether he is recollected at
his mission.'

'Certainly. But I do not expect it. The place is a great town now. I
say, Lucy, if you had one bit of poor Honor's hair!'

'No: you will never forgive me. I had some once, made up in a little
cross, with gold ends; but one day, when she would not let me go to
Castle Blanch, I shied it into the river, in a rage.'

She was touched at his being so spiritless as not even to say that she
ought to have been thrown in after it.

'I wonder,' she said, by way of enlivening him, 'whether you will fall in
with the auburn-haired Charlecote.'

'Whereas Canada is a bigger place than England, the disaster may be
averted, I hope. A colonial heir-at-law might be a monstrous bore.
Moreover, it would cancel all that I