with tiny soft footsteps neither seen nor
heard. The others grew up--would be men and women shortly--but the one
child that "was not," remained to us always a child.

I thought, even the last evening--the very last evening that John
returned from Enderley, and his wife went down to the stream to meet
him, and they came up the field together, as they had done so for many,
many years;--ay, even then I thought I saw his eyes turn to the spot
where a little pale figure used to sit on the door-sill, listening and
waiting for him, with her dove in her bosom. We never kept doves now.

And the same night, when all the household was in bed--even the mother,
who had gone about with a restless activity, trying to persuade herself
that there would be at least no possibility of accomplishing the
flitting to-morrow--the last night, when John went as usual to fasten
the house-door, he stood a long time outside, looking down the valley.

"How quiet everything is. You can almost hear the tinkle of the
stream. Poor old Longfield!" And I sighed, thinking we should never
again have such another home.

John did not answer. He had been mechanically bending aside and
training into its place a long shoot of wild clematis--virgin's bower,
which Guy and Muriel had brought in from the fields and planted, a tiny
root; it covered the whole front of the house now. Then he came and
leaned beside me over the wicket-gate, looking fixedly up into the
moon-light blue.

"I wonder if she knows we are leaving Longfield?"

"Who?" said I; for a moment forgetting.

"The child."

CHAPTER XXX

Father and son--a goodly sight, as they paced side by side up and down
the gravel walk--(alas! the pretty field-path belonged to days that
were!)--up and down the broad, sunshiny walk, in front of the
breakfast-room windows of Beechwood Hall.

It was early--little past eight o'clock; but we kept Longfield hours
and Longfield ways still. And besides, this was a grand day--the day
of Guy's coming of age. Curious it seemed to watch him, as he walked
along by his father, looking every inch "the young heir;" and perhaps
not unconscious that he did so;--curious enough, remembering how meekly
the boy had come into the world, at a certain old house at Norton Bury,
one rainy December morning, twenty-one years ago.

It was a bright day to-day--bright as all our faces were, I think, as
we gathered round the cosy breakfast-table. There, as heretofore, it
wa