There was no running after butterflies that morning; and it was long before I could soothe Blanche. Indeed, she bore the traces of dejection in her soft looks for many, many days; and she often asked me, sighingly, "Don't you think it was very wrong in me to take you there?" Poor little Blanche, true daughter of Eve, she would not let me bear my due share of the blame; she would have it all, in Adam's primitive way of justice,--"The woman tempted me, and I did eat." And since then Blanche has seemed more fond than ever of Roland, and comparatively deserts me to nestle close to him, and closer, till he looks up and says, "My child, you are pale; go and run after the butterflies;" and she says now to him, not to me, "Come too!" drawing him out into the sunshine with a hand that will not loose its hold. Of all Roland's line, this Herbert de Caxton was "the best and bravest!" yet he had never named that ancestor to me,--never put any forefather in comparison with the dubious and mythical Sir William. I now remembered once that, in going over the pedigree, I had been struck by the name of Herbert,--the only Herbert in the scroll,--and had asked, "What of him, uncle?" and Roland had muttered something inaudible, and turned away. And I remembered also that in Roland's room there was the mark on the wall where a picture of that size had once hung. The picture had been removed thence before we first came, but must have hung there for years to have left that mark on the wall,--perhaps suspended by Bolt during Roland's long Continental absence. "If ever I have a--" What were the missing words? Alas! did they not relate to the son,--missed forever, evidently not forgotten still? CHAPTER IV. My uncle sat on one side the fireplace, my mother on the other; and I, at a small table between them, prepared to note down the results of their conference; for they had met in high council, to assess their joint fortunes,--determine what should be brought into the common stock and set apart for the Civil List, and what should be laid aside as a Sinking Fund. Now my mother, true woman as she was, had a womanly love of show in her own quiet way,--of making "a genteel figure" in the eyes of the neighborhood; of seeing that sixpence not only went as far as sixpence ought to go, but that, in the going, it should emit a mild but imposing splendor,--not, indeed, a gaudy flash, a startling Borealian coruscation, which is scarcely within the modest and placid idiosyncracies of sixpence,--but a gleam of gentle and benign light, just to show where a sixpence had been, and allow you time to say "Behold!" before "The jaws of darkness did devour it up."