o stay a
little while with Mr. Buxton of Stanfield--you see I knew we could trust
him; and Mr. Hamon was in the passage just then looking at the guns; and
then a sailor came in to say that all was ready; and so we came away. But
it was so good to see him again; and to know that he was so happy."

Anthony looked at his sister in astonishment; her quiet manner was gone,
and she was talking again almost like an excited child; and so happily.
It was very strange, he thought. He sat down beside her.

"Oh, Anthony!" she said, "do you understand? I love him dearly still; and
his wife and child too. God bless them all and keep them!"

The mystery was still deep to him; and he feared to say what he should
not; so he kissed Isabel silently; and the two sat there together and
looked out over the crowding red roofs to the glowing western sky across
the bay below them.

CHAPTER III

HOME-COMING

It was a stormy summer evening as the brother and sister rode up between
the last long hills that led to Great Keynes. A south-west wind had been
rising all day, that same wind that was now driving the ruined Armada up
into the fierce North Sea, with the fiercer men behind to bar the return.
But here, twenty miles inland, with the high south-downs to break the
gale, the riders were in comparative quiet, though the great trees
overhead tossed their heavy rustling heads as the gusts struck them now
and again.

The party had turned off, as the dusk was falling, from the main-road
into bridle-paths that they knew well, and were now approaching the
village through the water meadows on the south-east side along a ride
that would bring them, round the village, direct to the Dower House. In
the gloom Anthony could make out the tall reeds, and the loosestrife and
willowherb against them, that marked the course of the stream where he
had caught trout, as a boy; and against the western sky, as he turned in
his saddle, rose up the high windy hills where he had hawked with Hubert
so many years before. It was a strange thought to him as he rode along
that his very presence here in his own country was an act of high treason
by the law lately passed, and that every day he lived here must be a day
of danger.

For Isabel, too, it was strange to be riding up again towards the
battlefield of her desires--that battlefield where she had lived for
years in such childish faith and peace with