was reported.

"Yea," said Steadfast, "he hath a grant of land, and a castle, and a
wife."

"Eh, now! Lack-a-day! 'Tis alway the most feather-pated that fly
highest."

Cromwell's Ironsides feather-pated! But that did not trouble Steadfast,
who all the way home, as he rode his donkey, was thinking of the
difference it made in his prospects, and in what he had to offer Emlyn
to be able to feel his tenure so much more secure.

Patience and Ben listened in utter amazement ending in a not
complimentary laugh on the part of the former. "Our Jeph lord of a
castle? I'd like to see him."

"Would you? He has a welcome and a husband ready for you and Rusha
both?"

"D'ye think I would go and leave you for Jeph, if he were lord of ten
castles?"

And Ben, whose recollections of Jeph were very dim, exclaimed, "Lord of
a castle! I shall have a crow over Nick Blane now!"

Rusha, who was well content with her service at the hall, had no mind
for such a terrible enterprise as a journey "beyond seas" to Ireland,
and mayhap Jeph's prospective husband was a less tempting idea, because
a certain young groom had shown symptoms of making her his sweetheart.

Steadfast thought often of telling the great secret of his heart to his
faithful sister Patience, but his extreme shyness and modesty, and the
reserve in which he always lived, seemed to make it impossible to him
to broach the subject, and there might be a certain consciousness that
Emlyn, while his own pet, had been very troublesome to Patience.

Stead was two-and-twenty, a sturdy well-grown fellow, but the hard work
he had been obliged to do as a growing lad, had rounded his shoulders,
and he certainly did not walk like the men who had been drilled for
soldiers. His face was healthy and sunburnt, with fair short hair and
straightforward grey eyes. At the first glance people would say, "What
a heavy-looking, clownish young man," but at the second there was
something that made a crying child in the street turn to him for help
in distress, and made the marketing dames secure that he told the truth
about his wares.

Patience was rather startled by seeing him laboriously tying up a posy
of wild rose, honeysuckle, and forget-me-not, and told him the Bristol
folks would not buy those common wild flowers.

"They are for none of them," replied Stead, a little gruffly, and
colouring hotly at being caught.

"Oh!" said Patience, in her simplicity. "Are they for Emlyn? I do not
think