investigated and admired all, down to the very scullery; then we
adjourned to the sitting-room--the only one--and, after tea, Ursula
arranged her books, some on stained shelves, which she proudly informed
me were of John's own making, and some on an old spinet, which he had
picked up, and which, he said, was of no other use than to hold books,
since she was not an accomplished young lady, and could neither sing
nor play.

"But you don't dislike the spinet, Ursula? It caught my fancy. Do you
know I have a faint remembrance that once, on such a thing as this, my
mother used to play?"

He spoke in a low voice; Ursula stole up to him with a fond, awed look.

"You never told me anything about your mother?"

"Dear, I had little to tell. Long ago you knew whom you were going to
marry--John Halifax, who had no friends, no kindred, whose parents left
him nothing but his name."

"And you cannot remember them?"

"My father not at all; my mother very little."

"And have you nothing belonging to them?"

"Only one thing. Should you like to see it?"

"Very much." She still spoke slowly, and with slight hesitation. "It
was hard for him not to have known his parents," she added, when John
had left the room. "I should like to have known them too. But
still--when I know HIM--"

She smiled, tossed back the coronet of curls from her forehead--her
proud, pure forehead, that would have worn a coronet of jewels more
meekly than it now wore the unadorned honour of being John Halifax's
wife. I wished he could have seen her.

That minute he re-appeared.

"Here, Ursula, is all I have of my parents. No one has seen it, except
Phineas there, until now."

He held in his hand the little Greek Testament which he had showed me
years before. Carefully, and with the same fond, reverent look as when
he was a boy, he undid the case, made of silk, with ribbon
strings--doubtless a woman's work--it must have been his mother's. His
wife touched it, softly and tenderly. He showed her the fly-leaf; she
looked over the inscription, and then repeated it aloud.

"'Guy Halifax, gentleman.' I thought--I thought--"

Her manner betrayed a pleased surprise: she would not have been a
woman, especially a woman reared in pride of birth, not to have felt
and testified the like pleasure for a moment.

"You thought that I was only a labourer's son: or--nobody's. Well,
does it signify?"

"No," she cried, as, clinging round his neck and thr