In most of this account the thread was easily traceable; the baronet recalled to mind some vague connection of his brother’s late huntsman, Griffiths, or “Welsh Will,” as he was called, with the fatal incidents—he had heard his son Francis talk years before of a boy about Stoke, whom the huntsman’s vixen wife persecuted and kept out of doors. He had been sent to some business, so far as Sir Godfrey remembered, through Mr Hesketh. The baronet stated as much to the people before him. “Thou’rt wrong, though, Jeannette,” said the son-in-law again, with the same side-tone, irrespective of their visitor’s presence, rather through a dull incapability to acknowledge it than from intention; “she grieves for him. When thou’dst say, remember, during the sharp winter, thou wert glad thy brother’s mouth was not here, did she not groan—and when the fine time came again, while thou wert so apt to taunt us about her son being grown English, she swung herself and wept! You feel it, you wish your son back here, _Marraine_ (godmother), do you not?” The elder woman turned from the light to him with a start and a stare; perhaps it was the bright sunshine that made her face seem faded beside it, especially where the scar-mark ran; she looked, to the stranger’s eye, almost ghastly, as she replied, in a less cracked and tremulous voice than before—“Holy Virgin, yes! You will send—you will take care of—ah!” And as she stopped, perplexed and troubled, the moisture sprang from her dull-blue eyes into tears; she passed one hand about the disfigured place; she seemed nearer clearness of speech on the subject than hitherto, as if that had been a master-spring to her scattered memories. “My good woman,” said the baronet soothingly, as he stepped nearer, into the recess where her easy-chair stood—“My good Madame Deroux—if you wish your son to return to you, it shall be managed, of course! You will see him, I hope, grown up and prosperous, as well as able to assist you! It would, no doubt, have been a burden before!—She or you could scarcely recognise him now, however,” he added aside to the daughter, in an undertone. “It is easy enough, Monsieur,” was the careless answer, without any responsive depression of voice, “since the arm would not lose such a mark, more than my mother’s visage—added to the loss of the little finger. I was too young to remember it, you see—but the washerwoman who kept us both, and who used privately to bring the child at intervals to my mother, leaving it for the night—she had again seen it after its recovery, and lodged along with us afterwards till her death.” Suzanne Deroux had felt hastily for something beneath the bosom of her dress, and at length drew it forth; a thin gold cross with black beads, which she kissed with fervour, then began eagerly to whisper and mutter some scraps of prayer, that might have been Latin or _patois_, or both; at each bead that fell from her fingers her face seemed growing calmer.