s said by a passer-by, who had involuntarily
overheard, that Luke Claridge had used harsh and profane words to Lord
Eglington, though he had no inkling of the subject of the bitter talk.
He supposed, however, that Luke had gone to reprove the other for a
wasteful and wandering existence; for desertion of that Quaker religion
to which his grandfather, the third Earl of Eglington, had turned in
the second half of his life, never visiting his estates in Ireland, and
residing here among his new friends to his last day. This listener--John
Fairley was his name--kept his own counsel. On two other occasions had
Lord Eglington visited the Cloistered House in the years that passed,
and remained many months. Once he brought his wife and child. The former
was a cold, blue-eyed Saxon of an old family, who smiled distantly upon
the Quaker village; the latter, a round-headed, warm-faced youth, with a
bold, menacing eye, who probed into this and that, rushed here and there
as did his father; now built a miniature mill; now experimented at some
peril in the laboratory which had been arranged in the Cloistered House
for scientific experiments; now shot partridges in the fields where
partridges had not been shot for years; and was as little in the picture
as his adventurous father, though he wore a broad-brimmed hat, smiling
the while at the pain it gave to the simple folk around him.

And yet once more the owner of the Cloistered House returned alone. The
blue-eyed lady was gone to her grave; the youth was abroad. This time
he came to die. He was found lying on the floor of his laboratory with
a broken retort in fragments beside him. With his servant, Luke
Claridge was the first to look upon him lying in the wreck of his last
experiment, a spirit-lamp still burning above him, in the grey light
of a winter's morning. Luke Claridge closed the eyes, straightened
the body, and crossed the hands over the breast which had been the
laboratory of many conflicting passions of life.

The dead man had left instructions that his body should be buried in the
Quaker graveyard, but Luke Claridge and the Elders prevented that--he
had no right to the privileges of a Friend; and, as the only son was
afar, and no near relatives pressed the late Earl's wishes, the ancient
family tomb in Ireland received all that was left of the owner of the
Cloistered House, which, with the estates in Ireland and the title,
passed to the wandering son.

CHAPTER II.