"It is aggravating! I believe the little brat already views me as an interloper; and though I knew his age, he is on a larger scale than I expected, and certainly looks old for the child of a man so youthful as Greville; and then he speaks with the odious Devonshire patois!" "One lucky thing is that your engagement will not be a long one, if you are satisfied for the time with this poor--though certainly pretty--place." "It satisfied _her_," thought Patty, glancing at the distant spire, the shadow of which was falling on Mary's grave; and the old woman crept away, as she had heard more than enough, muttering, "after all these years I'd give him warning this very hour, but for the sake of the child. Poor Derval! from this day, I fear me, his life will be a blighted one! Dear, dear! but the master has soon begun to sweeten the hay again!" she added, referring to an old Cornish practice common among lovers in haymaking time. So barely a year had elapsed, since the woman who clung to him so tenderly and truly in poverty, as in wealth, and whose heart had been for years against his own, had been laid in the silent grave, when Greville Hampton brought another--but not a fairer--wife to share his cottage home. That home he had spared no expense his means permitted to decorate for the new idol, who had certainly not come to him undowered. Many old and familiar objects had been removed--there were cogent reasons why--and gave place to newer fancies. While Derval and Patty had been the sole occupants of the cottage at Finglecombe, the wedded pair had been spending their honeymoon on the continent; they had seen Antwerp with its cathedral and the art treasures of its galleries; Cologne and Coblentz, the precipitous Kolandseck with its baronial ruin and mouldering arch; hill-encircled Ems, the banks of the picturesque Lake, wooded Nassau and merry Wiesbaden; Greville the while judiciously silent that he had gone all that bridal tour once _before_. But now he thoroughly believed in his second election; and it has been said that, at few times, or at no time, of his life, is a man such a true believer in faith and love as when he plunges into matrimony; and we must suppose that it was so with Greville Hampton. The arrival of the bride at Finglecombe, with all her boxes and that "particular baggage," as Patty thought, her own maid, was a source of sore worry to the former, who could no longer pursue the even tenor of her way under the new state of things. Greville kissed his little boy, who clung fondly to him; but the bride gave the latter her gloved hand coldly, and scanned him through her glass, while he eyed her with mistrust and wonder, and with a strange shrinking, for somehow her eye chilled him, and thus, at the very home-coming there was a petty _contretemps_. "Kiss him, Anne dearest," said Greville; "go and be kissed by your mamma, Derval." "She is not my mamma," said the child recoiling. "Go and be kissed by her instantly, sir!"