“No, he was not married, but there was some talk of an _affaire du cœur_ between him and a young English girl, who went off soon after. There’s a bug on your dress, Miss Lyle. Why,”—and, as if it had just occurred to him, Godfrey continued,—“your name is the same as his. It cannot be, though, that you were at all related. He lived up near Alnwick. On our way from Scotland, father and I hunted up his friends, a sister and widowed mother,—poor but honest women, as the biographers say. The mother lives with her daughter, and we gave them a thousand dollars, and the young woman promised to call her little boy after me. The Governor,—that’s father,—did not quite like it, I guess, but I don’t see the harm. Why, I’ve named three different Dutch babies in Hampstead, all the children of Mrs. Peterkin Vandeusenhisen. Two of them are twins,—and I called one Godfrey Schuyler, and the other Schuyler Godfrey,—while the third, which happened to be a girl, was christened Alice Creighton,—that’s a young lady from New York, fathers ward, who is at Hampstead a great deal,—and so proud! You ought to have seen her bit of a pug nose go up when she heard the Dutch baby baptized. Why, she nearly jumped out of her skin when Mrs. Van,—as I call her for short,—on being asked for the name, replied: ‘Alice Creighton Vandeusenhisen, if you please.’ The last was a suggestion of my own, by way of making a more striking impression on Alice, because you see, Mrs. Vandeusenhisen had a son,—Peterkin, junior, who was in love with Miss Creighton, and used to send her cakes of maple sugar and sticks of molasses candy he made and pulled himself. You ought to see his hands! The day before the christening I dressed up like a gypsy and deceived the girls and told their fortune, and said Alice would marry a Dutchman, with a long name, like _Vandue_ something. So complete was my disguise that they did not suspect me, and when Alice heard the name at church, Alice Creighton Vandeusenhisen, she started up as if to forbid the banns, and then catching sight of my face she understood it at once, and was so angry, and when we were home from church she cried and said she hated me and would never speak to me again. But she got over it, and last Christmas sent a wax doll with a squawk in its stomach to her namesake.” Godfrey had wandered very far from the woman on the heather hills who had called Abelard Lyle her son, and though Edith wished to know something more of her she did not venture to question her companion lest he should wonder at her interest in an entire stranger. She had laughed immoderately at his account of the babies named for himself and Miss Alice, and when he finished she said: “You must be very fond of children, I think.”