She recalled now the pang those words had caused her, and how she dreaded the parting which came all too soon, and had been so bitter to her. Now, she had her son restored to her, but she felt, as how many mothers have felt since, a strange hunger of the soul, for her vanished child! Ambrose, quiet and sedate, and eager to be an accomplished scholar, tall, almost dignified, for his sixteen years, was indeed her son, and she could thank God for him. Yet she thought with a strange regret, of the days when he threw his arms round her in a rough embrace, or trotted chattering by her side as she went about the farm, or, still sweeter memory, murmured in his sleep her name, and looked up at her with a half-awakened smile, as he found her near, and felt her kisses on his forehead. From these thoughts Mary was roused by Ambrose himself,-- 'Mother,' he said, 'this is too far for you to walk. You should not have ventured down the hill. We have returned to find the house empty; and my father is in some distress when he heard you had come so far.' Ambrose spoke as if he were constituted his mother's caretaker; and Lucy, laughing, said,-- 'You need not look so mighty grave about it, Ambrose; your mother is not tired. Forsooth, one would think you were an old man giving counsel, rather than a boy.' Ambrose disliked of all things to be called a boy; and, since his first remark about the baby Philip, there had often been a little war of words between aunt and nephew. 'Boys may have more wits than grown folk sometime,' he replied. 'Here comes my father, who does not think me such a fool as, perchance, you do, Aunt Lucy. He has brought a horse to carry my mother up the steep hill.' 'Well, I will leave her to your double care,' Lucy said. 'I see George follows a-foot. We will go up the hill path, and be at home before you, I'll warrant.' She ran gaily away to meet George; and as Mary was lifted on the pillion by Humphrey, Ambrose taking his place by his mother, he turned in the opposite direction, and, following Lucy and her husband, was soon out of sight. Mother and son rode slowly along the familiar path which leads into the high road from Penshurst. The glow of sunset was around them, and the crimson cloth mantle Mary wore shone in the westering light. So they pass out of sight, and the shadows gather over the landscape, and evening closes in. As a dream when one awaketh is the history of the past, and the individual lives which stand out in it are like phantoms which we strive, perhaps in vain, to quicken into life once more, and clothe them with the vivid colours for which imagination may lend its aid. Of the central figure of this story of the spacious times of great Elizabeth, we may say--with the sister who loved him with no common love--