a shaded taper still burning in a high bracket where an image
of the Mother of God had stood in the Catholic days of the house. Hubert
glanced up at it and remembered it, with just a touch at his heart.
Beneath it was a little oak cot, where his four-year-old boy lay
sleeping; the mother went across and bent over it, and Hubert leaned his
brown sinewy hands on the end of the cot and watched him. There his son
lay, with tangled curls on the pillow; his finger was on his lips as if
he bade silence even to thought. Hubert looked up, and just above the
bed, where the crucifix used to hang when he himself had slept in this
nursery, probably on the very same nail, he thought to himself, was a
rusty Spanish spur that he himself had found in a sea-chest of the _San
Juan_. The boy had hung up with a tarry bit of string this emblem of his
father's victory, as a protection while he slept.

The child stirred in his sleep and murmured as the two watched him.

"Father's home again," whispered the mother. "It is all well. Go to sleep
again."

When she looked up again to her husband, he was gone.

* * * *

It was not often that Hubert had regrets for the Faith he had lost; but
to-night things had conspired to prick him. There was his rebuff from Mr.
Buxton; there was the sight of Isabel in the dignified grace that he had
noticed so plainly before; there had been the interview with the
ex-Catholic servant, now a spy of the Government, and a remorseless enemy
of all Catholics; and lastly there were the two little external reminders
of the niche and the nail over his son's bed.

He sat long before the fire in Sir Nicholas' old room, now his own study.
As he lay back and looked about him, how different this all was, too! The
mantelpiece was almost unaltered; the Maxwell devices, two-headed eagles,
hurcheons and saltires, on crowded shields, interlaced with the motto
_Reviresco_, all newly gilded since his own accession to the estate, rose
up in deep shadow and relief; but over it, instead of the little old
picture of the Vernacle that he remembered as a child, hung his own
sword. Was that a sign of progress? he wondered. The tapestry on the east
wall was the same, a hawking scene with herons and ladies in immense
headdresses that he had marvelled at as a boy. But then the books on the
shelves to the right of the door, they were different; there had been old
devotional books in his father's