The neighbours wondered very much at my father's having taken in Cuthbert. It was not a bit like Stephen Lisle, everybody said, to do such an out-of-the-way thing. Perhaps it was not; but I believe most people do something that is not a bit like themselves once or twice in their lives. My father heeded them very little. He could never make shift to get on, the neighbours further said, all by himself, with two boys to look after. That was true enough. He pondered over it in his silent way for many a day, and at last he made up his mind. Late one evening White Billy came slowly under the archway, and in the cart beside my father, who had been away for a day and a half, sat a little old woman, with a very big black bonnet and a red cloak. My father called me. 'Willie, here's your grandmother.' And the little old woman got down slowly from the cart, and said, 'Dear, dear! Is this your boy, Stephen?' 'Yes, mother.' The name sounded strange from my father's lips, strange and sad too, for he used to call my mother, 'mother.' It was odd and perplexing to me altogether, that my father should begin to have a mother just when I had lost mine. I stared hard at my grandmother. She had come to stay, I soon found out,--come to take care, my father said, of me and of the house. 'And of Cuthbert,' I said, jealously. My father only nodded, but that was consent enough to satisfy me. My old grandmother took possession quietly and humbly enough. The morning after she came I found her looking out over the ruins with rather a forlorn expression on her gentle old face. 'Do you like the Castle?' I asked her. 'I don't know, my dear, I don't know. It looks an outlandish tumble-down kind of place. I never saw any like it.' 'This was the great gateway,' I said, with a child's eagerness to teach anybody a great deal older than himself. 'There used to be a draw-bridge here once.' 'Dear, dear!' said my grandmother not understanding the least, 'was there indeed?' 'And yonder's the keep. They kept all their stores in there, you know, grandmother.' 'Well, to be sure!' 'And the dungeons are underneath, where the prisoners used to be.' 'Lawk a' mercy, poor things!' 'And grandmother, you've heard of the Queen's Tower?' 'No, my dear, I know nothing at all about it.' 'But you'll have to tell the people when they come to see it,' I said anxiously. 'Mother always did.' 'I can't, my dear. I know nothing of the place.' 'But you'll learn, won't you? I will teach you.' 'My dear, I am a great deal too old to learn.' She looked quite frightened and confused. I shook my head and said no more. I did not see how she was to get on at all, and I thought how very different people's mothers could be from one another. Years afterwards I understood good old Granny better. When she was very old and feeble she used to tell me--Granny was always fond of talking--about the little home she had left to come and keep house for her son in his time of trouble.