He had made no movement towards ejecting his tenant from Leyburn Abbey. He had found rest and shelter at Allerdale, and had very soon come to love the old earl as he would have loved a father. And the earl had quickly learned to love him. It had not needed the good word of his son. His own heart had found the lovable man; and love had been given without stint. And the little Cordelia, now completing her twelfth year--she was like a ray of blessed sunlight in the old castle. She was a plump little thing, bright and winsome, her silken locks giving promise of a rich golden brown; her large gray eyes, like twin stars, full of laughter and full of warm, impulsive love. Where she loved she would love with all her heart; and strange as it may appear, her first and warmest love was given to the old earl--“Gran’pa,” she called him, with her two dimpled arms round his neck and her rosy lips pressed upon his cheek. And the love that Lord Allerdale gave to the bright-faced little girl became part of his very life. He could not, after a time, bear to have her away from him. He held her on his knee; he carried her in his arms; he led her in the court and in the park, and he played with her; in short, in her society he renewed, not his youth, but his very childhood. What a happy old man he was when the little child had him in full subjection. Lord Oakleigh had spoken of another as the prospective playmate of Cordelia--his son, Matthew. And Matthew Brandon played with her often, though she would always leave him for the companionship of his grandfather. Matthew Brandon was now entering his sixteenth years--just the age of the smuggler’s son. He was not what would be called a handsome boy. His complexion was dark; his hair intensely black; and his eyes, deeply set in their sockets, were small, with an unusually narrow space between them. His face was not a mirror of frankness; and the servants were painfully aware of two lamentable facts: First, he could be cruel and vengeful; and second, he could lie. Of this, however, his grandfather was ignorant. The servants loved him too well to pain him by the telling, while the boy was wise and wary enough to hide his darker side from those who had authority to punish. On the same November day that saw the smuggler chief lay dying in the stone cottage by the Cove, Sir William Chester lay dying in one of the tapestried chambers of Allerdale Castle. He had sent for Matthew, and the boy had come--had come reluctantly enough from the making of a rabbit-trap. With his failing hand on the lad’s head, Sir William told him of his father--told him what a good, true and loyal man he was.