igh over a great
cushion, but her eyes and her mouth were the eyes of Dickie of Deptford.

Lady Talbot was very charming to the children, played hide-and-seek with
them, and gave them a delightful and varied tea in the yew arbor.

"I'm glad you wouldn't let me adopt you, Richard," she said, when
Elfrida and Edred had been sent to her garden to get a basket of peaches
to take home with them, "because just when I had become entirely
attached to you, you would have found out your real relations, and
where would your poor foster-mother have been then?"

"If I could have stayed with you I would," said Dickie seriously. "I did
like you most awfully, even then. You are very like the Lady Arden whose
husband was shut up in the Tower for the Gunpowder Plot."

"So they tell me," said Lady Talbot, "but how do you know it?"

"I don't know," said Dickie confused, "but you _are_ like her."

"You must have seen a portrait of her. There's one in the National
Portrait Gallery. She was a Delamere, and my name was Delamere, too,
before I was married. She was one of the same family, you see, dear."

Dickie put his arms round her waist as she sat beside him, and laid his
head on her shoulder.

"I wish you'd really been my mother," he said, and his thoughts were
back in the other days with the mother who wore a ruff and hoop. Lady
Talbot hugged him tenderly.

"My dear little Dickie," she said, "you don't wish it as much as I do."

"There are all sorts of things a chap can't be sure of--things you
mustn't tell any one. Secrets, you know--honorable secrets. But if it
was your own mother it would be different. But if you haven't got a
mother you have to decide everything for yourself."

"Won't you let me help you?" she asked.

Dickie, his head on her shoulder, was for one wild moment tempted to
tell her everything--the whole story, from beginning to end. But he knew
that she could not understand it--or even believe it. No grown-up person
could. A chap's own mother might have, perhaps--but perhaps not, too.

"I can't tell you," he said at last, "only I don't think I want to be
Lord Arden. At least, I do, frightfully. It's so splendid, all the
things the Ardens did--in history, you know. But I don't want to turn
people out--and you know Edred came and saved me from those people. It
feels hateful when I think perhaps they'll have to turn out just because
I happened to turn up. Sometimes I feel as if I simply couldn't bear
it."

"Yo