I can ask
you. I want to know of your mother and you together."

"We were never together. When I opened my eyes she closed hers. It was
so little to get for the life she gave. See, was it not a good face?"
He drew from his pocket a little locket which Faith had given him years
ago, and opened it before her.

Hylda looked long. "She was exquisite," she said, "exquisite."

"My father I never knew either. He was a captain of a merchant ship. He
married her secretly while she was staying with an aunt at Portsmouth.
He sailed away, my mother told my grandfather all, and he brought her
home here. The marriage was regular, of course, but my grandfather,
after announcing it, and bringing it before the Elders, declared that
she should never see her husband again. She never did, for she died a
few months after, when I came, and my father died very soon, also. I
never saw him, and I do not know if he ever tried to see me. I never had
any feeling about it. My grandfather was the only father I ever knew,
and Faith, who was born a year before me, became like a sister to
me, though she soon made other pretensions!" He laughed again, almost
happily. "To gain an end she exercised authority as my aunt!"

"What was your father's name?"

"Fetherdon--James Fetherdon."

"Fetherdon--James Fetherdon!" Involuntarily Hylda repeated the name
after him. Where had she heard the name before--or where had she seen
it? It kept flashing before her eyes. Where had she seen it? For days
she had been rummaging among old papers in the library of the Cloistered
House, and in an old box full of correspondence and papers of the late
countess, who had died suddenly. Was it among them that she had seen the
name? She could not tell. It was all vague, but that she had seen it or
heard it she was sure.

"Your father's people, you never knew them?"

He shook his head. "Nor of them. Here was my home--I had no desire to
discover them. We draw in upon ourselves here."

"There is great force in such a life and such a people," she answered.
"If the same concentration of mind could be carried into the wide life
of the world, we might revolutionise civilisation; or vitalise and
advance it, I mean--as you are doing in Egypt."

"I have done nothing in Egypt. I have sounded the bugle--I have not had
my fight."

"That is true in a sense," she replied. "Your real struggle is before
you. I do not know why I say it, but I do say it; I feel it. Something
here"--she