e they both well and both happy, dame?" the Duchess asked. "Yes,
that they are, I see. And I know they are both good."

She took the girl's face in both hands and smiled into it as she might
have smiled at a flower, and then kissed her tenderly. She gave her a
little new gown and a pretty huswife stocked with implements to make
it. She put her hand on the boy's shoulder and looked at him as his
mother would have looked had she been tender of him.

"For you, Robin," she said, "there are books. I know 'tis books and
learning you long for, and you shall have them. His Grace's Chaplain
has promised me to teach you."

The boy clasped the books under his arm, hugging them against his
breast, and when her Grace turned to the next newcomer he seized a fold
of her robe and kissed it.

"Who are those children?" the Captain-General asked. "They do not look
like rustics."

"Those two she rescued also," answered Mistress Anne in a low voice.
"She found them in a thieves' haunt being trained as pickpockets. They
are the cast-off offspring of a gentleman who lived an evil life."

"Was she told his name?"

"Yes," Mistress Anne said, lower still; "'twas a gentleman who
was--lost. Sir John Oxon."

The mystery of this gentleman's disappearance was a thing forgotten,
but Mistress Anne's hearer recalled it, and that the man had left an
evil reputation, and that 'twas said that in the first bloom of his
youth he had been among the worshippers of the Gloucestershire beauty,
and there passed through the old Duke's mind a vague wonder as to
whether the Duchess remembered girlish sentiments the hoyden had lived
through and forgot.

It seemed the man's name being once drawn from the past was not to be
allowed to rest, for later in the day he heard of him again, and
curiously indeed.

There came in the afternoon from town a sturdy, loud-voiced country
gentleman, with a red, honest face and a good-humoured eye, and he was
so received by the family--by his Grace, who shook him warmly by the
hand, by the Duchess, who gave him both hers to kiss, and by the young
ones, who cried out in rejoicing over him--that their distinguished
guest perceived him to be an old friend who was, as it were, an old
comrade.

And so it proved, for 'twas soon revealed to him by the gentleman
himself (whose name was Sir Christopher Crowell, and whose estate lay
on the borders of Warwickshire and Gloucestershire) that he had been
one of the boon companions of