His wife was waiting for him in the hall now--a delicate golden-haired figure, with pathetic blue eyes turned up to him. She ran to him and took his arm timidly in her two hands. "Oh! I am glad that man has gone, Hubert." He looked down at her almost contemptuously. "Why, you know nothing of him!" he said. "Not much," she said, "but he asked me so many questions." Hubert started and looked suddenly at her, in terror. "Oh, Hubert!" she said, shrinking back frightened. "Questions!" he said, seizing her hands. "Questions of whom?" "Of--of--Mistress Isabel Norris," she said, almost crying. "And--and--what did you say? Did you tell him?" "Oh, Hubert!--I am so sorry--ah! do not look like that." "What did you say? What did you say?" he said between his teeth. "I--I--told a lie, Hubert; I said I had never seen her." Hubert took his wife suddenly in his two arms and kissed her three or four times. "You darling, you darling!" he said; and then stooped and picked her up, and carried her upstairs, with her head against his cheek, and her tears running down because he was pleased with her, instead of angry. They went upstairs and he set her down softly outside the nursery door. "Hush," she said, smiling up at him; and then softly opened the door and listened, her finger on her lip; there was no sound from within; then she pushed the door open gently, and the wife and husband went in. There was 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. * * * *