This listener--John Fairley was his name--kept his own counsel.

On two other occasions had Lord Eglington visited the Cloistered House in the years that passed, and remained many months.

Once he brought his wife and child.

The former was a cold, blue-eyed Saxon of an old family, who smiled distantly upon the Quaker village; the latter, a round-headed, warm-faced youth, with a bold, menacing eye, who probed into this and that, rushed here and there as did his father; now built a miniature mill; now experimented at some peril in the laboratory which had been arranged in the Cloistered House for scientific experiments; now shot partridges in the fields where partridges had not been shot for years; and was as little in the picture as his adventurous father, though he wore a broad-brimmed hat, smiling the while at the pain it gave to the simple folk around him.
And yet once more the owner of the Cloistered House returned alone.

The blue-eyed lady was gone to her grave; the youth was abroad.