be their home. She had brought him out early in the
morning to see the sun rise upon their home, and the rapture of his
face, the passionate joy she saw written there, was more than she had
hoped for.

"Thou hast grown old and worn of late, too saddened, too grave for thy
years. Thou must grow young again, and be the bright-faced youth to whom
I gave my heart. Thy youth is not left so far behind but what thou canst
recall it ere it be too late."

"In sooth I shall grow young again here, sweetheart," quoth Wendot, or
Vychan, as we must call him now. He had an equal right to that name with
his father, though for convenience he had always been addressed by the
other; and now that Lady Gertrude had brought her husband home, he was
to be known as Res Vychan, one of the descendants of the last princes of
South Wales, who had taken his wife's name also, as he was now the ruler
of her land; so, according to the fashion of the English people, he
would henceforth be known as Vychan Cherleton. His brother's name he
could not bear to hear applied to himself, and it was left to Joanna to
explain matters to the king and queen when the chance should arrive.
None else need ever know that the husband of the Lady Gertrude had ever
been a captive of Edward's; and the name of Griffeth ap Res Vychan
disappears from the ken of the chroniclers as if it had never been known
that he was once a prisoner in England.

There was no pursuit made after the missing Welshman. The king and queen
had other matters to think of, and the fondness of their son for the
youth would have been protection enough even if he had not begged with
his dying breath that his father would forgive and forget. Lady Gertrude
and her husband did not come to court for very many years; and by the
time they did so, Vychan Cherleton's loyalty and service to the English
cause were too well established for any one to raise a question as to
his birth or race.

If the king and queen ever knew they had been outwitted by their
children, they did not resent that this had been so, nor that an act of
mercy had been contrived greater than they might have felt justified in
ratifying.

But all this was yet in the future. As Vychan and his wife stood on that
high plateau overlooking the fair valley of the Derwent, it seemed to
Gertrude as though during the past three days her husband had undergone
some subtle change. There was a new light in his eyes; his frame had
lost its drooping ai