re loathed this roundabout management, and tried to wean Walter by
consulting him frankly on the daily business of the estate. But no again:
Walter seemingly cared little for these confidences: and again, although
he learned to shoot and was a fair horseman, he put no heart into his
sports. His religion debarred him from a public school; or, rather--in
Mrs. a Cleeve's view--it made all the public schools undesirable.
When she first suggested Dinan (and in a way which convinced the Squire
that she and Father Halloran had made up their minds months before), for a
moment he feared indignantly that they meant to make a priest of his boy.
But Mrs. a Cleeve resigned that prospect with a sigh. Walter must marry
and continue the family. Nevertheless, when Great Britain formally
renounced the Peace of Amiens, and Master Walter found himself among the
_detenus_, his mother sighed again to think that, had he been designed for
the priesthood, he would have escaped molestation; while his father no
less ruefully cursed the folly which had brought him within Bonaparte's
clutches.

Mrs. a Cleeve sat by her boudoir fire embroidering an altar frontal for
the private chapel. At the sound of a footstep in the passage she stopped
her work with a sharp contraction of the heart: even the clattering wooden
shoes could not wholly disguise that footstep for her. She was rising
from her deep chair as Walter opened the door; but sank back trembling,
and put a hand over her white face.

"Mother!"

It was he. He was kneeling: she felt his hands go about her waist and his
head sink in her lap.

"Oh, Walter! Oh, my son!"

"Mother!" he repeated with a sob. She bent her face and kissed him.

"Those horrible clothes--you have suffered! But you have escaped!
Tell me--"

In broken sentences he began to tell her.

"You have seen your father?" she asked, interrupting him.

"Not yet. I have seen nobody: I came straight to you."

"He is greatly aged."

There came a knock at the door, and Father Halloran stood on the threshold
confounded.

The priest was a tall and handsome Irishman, white-haired, with a genial
laughing eye, and a touch of grave wisdom behind his geniality.

"Walter, dear lad! For the love of the saints tell us--how does this
happen?"

Walter began his story again. The mother gazed into his face in a
rapture. But the priest's brow, at first jolly, little by little
contracted with a puzzled frown.

"I don't alto