"Musical boxes!" exclaimed Sir Geoffry. "Do you care for them?" "Oh yes; they are beautiful. Do you know the little lame boy who can't walk, down Piefinch Cut? His father comes to do grandmamma's garden. Do you know him, Sir Geoffry? His name's Reuben." "It's Noah, the gardener's son, sir," put in Mrs. Layne aside to Sir Geoffry. "He was thrown downstairs when a baby, and has been a cripple ever since." But the eager, intelligent eyes were still cast up, waiting for the answer. "Where _have_ I seen them?" mentally debated Sir Geoffry, alluding to the eyes. "I know the name?" he answered. "Well, Reuben has got a musical box, and it plays three tunes. He is older than I am: he's ten. One of them is 'The Blue Bells of Scotland.'" Sir Geoffry nodded and went away. He crossed straight over to Mr. Duffham's, and found him writing a letter in his surgery. "I hope the child will do well," said the baronet, when he had shaken hands. "I have just been to see him. What an intelligent, nice little fellow it is." "Oh, he will be all right again in time, Sir Geoffry," was the doctor's reply, as he began to fold his letter. "He is a pretty boy, too, very. His eyes are strangely like some one's I have seen, but for the life of me I cannot tell whose!" "_Really?_--do you mean it?" cried Mr. Duffham, speaking, as it seemed, in some surprise. "Mean what?" "That you cannot tell." "Indeed I can't. They puzzled me all the while I was there. Do you know? Say, if you do." "They are like your own, Sir Geoffry." "Like my own!" "They are your own eyes over again. And yours--as poor Layne used to say, and as the picture in the Grange dining-room shows us also, for the matter of that--are Sir Peter's. Sir Peter's, yours, and the child's: they are all the same." For a long space of time, as it seemed, the two gentlemen gazed at each other. Mr. Duffham with a questioning and still surprised look: Sir Geoffry in a kind of bewildered amazement. "Duffham! you--you---- Surely it is not _that_ child!" "Yes, it is." He backed to a chair and stumbled into it, rather than sat down; somewhat in the same manner that Mrs. Layne had backed against the counter nearly seven years before and upset the scales. The old lady seemed to have aged since quicker than she ought to have done: but her face then had not been whiter than was Geoffry Chavasse's now. "Good Heavens!" The dead silence was only broken by these murmured words that fell from his lips. Mr. Duffham finished folding his note, and directed it. "Sir Geoffry, I beg your pardon! I beg it a thousand times. If I had had the smallest notion that you were ignorant of this, I should never have spoken." Sir Geoffry took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. Some moisture had gathered there. "How was I to suspect it?" he asked. "I never supposed but that you must have known it all along." "All along from when, Duffham?" "From--from--well, from the time you first knew that a child was over there."