No wonder that at the thought of those days, and of the loving care and gentle hands which had guarded him from hour to hour, the solitary child crouching in the hay and darkness cried long and passionately. He knew little of the quarrel between King and Commons, and nothing of Laud or Strafford, Pym or Hampden, Ship-money or the New Model. But he could suffer. He was old enough to remember and feel, and compare past things with present; and understanding that today his father's house was passing into the hands of strangers, he experienced all the terror and anguish which a sense of homelessness combined with helplessness can inflict. Lonely and neglected he had been for some time now; but he had felt his loneliness little (comparatively speaking) until to-day. Agent Hoby had finished his supper. Stretching his legs before the empty hearth in the attitude of one who had done a day's work, he was in the act of admonishing Gridley the butler on his duty to his new master, when he became aware of a slight movement in the direction of the door. The panelled walls of the parlor in which he sat swallowed up the light, and the candles stood in his way. He had to raise one above his head and peer below it before he could make out anything. When he did, and the face of the lad he had seen by the gate grew as it were out of the panel, his first feeling was one of alarm. He started and muttered an exclamation, thinking that he saw amiss; and that either the October he had drunk was stronger than ordinary, or there was something uncanny in the house. When a second look, however, persuaded him that the boy was there in the flesh, he gave way to anger. "Gridley!" he said, knitting his brows, "who is this, and how does he come to be here? Is he one of your brats, man?" "One of mine?" the butler answered stupidly. "Ay, one of yours! Or how comes he to be here?" the agent answered querulously, sitting forward with a hand on each arm of his chair, and frowning at the boy, who returned his gaze with interest. The butler looked at the lad as if he were considering him in some new light, and hesitated before he answered. "It is the young master," he said at last. "The young what?" the agent exclaimed, leaning still farther forward, and putting into the words as much surprise as possible. "It is the young master," Gridley repeated sullenly. "And he is here in season, for I want to know what I am to do with him." "Do you mean that he is a Patten?" Hoby muttered, staring at the lad as if he were bewitched. "To be sure," Gridley answered, looking also at the boy. "But your master had only one son? Those were my instructions." "Two," said the butler. "Master Francis--" "Who is with Duke Hamilton in Scotland, and if caught in arms in England will hang," rejoined the agent, sternly. "Well?" "And this one."