“No.  You are a brave girl, an honest girl.  I love you more than a bit, and, for your sake, I forgive him the whole thing.  I will never call it sacrilege again, since its effect was to save an angel’s life.  Come, now, you have shown a proper spirit, and stood up for the absent, and brought me to submission by your impetuosity, so don’t spoil it all by crying.”

“No, I won’t,” said Grace, with a gulp.  But her tears would not cease all in a moment.  She had evoked that tender scene, in which words and tears of true and passionate love had rained upon her.  They were an era in her life; had swept forever out of her heart all the puny voices that had prattled what they called love to her; and that divine music, should she ever hear it again?  She had resigned it, had bidden it shine upon another.  For this, in reality, her tears were trickling.

Mr. Raby took a much lighter view of it, and, to divert attention from her, he said, “Hallo! why this inscription has become legible.  It used to be only legible in parts.  Is that his doing?”

“Not a doubt of it,” said Amboyne.

“Set that against his sacrilege.”

“Miss Carden and I are both agreed it was not sacrilege.  What is here in this pew?  A brass!  Why this is the brass we could none of us decipher.  Hang me, if he has not read it, and restored it!”

“So he has.  And where’s the wonder?  We live in a glorious age” (Raby smiled) “that has read the written mountains of the East, and the Abyssinian monuments:  and he is a man of the age, and your mediaeval brasses are no more to him than cuneiform letters to Rawlinson.  Let me read this resuscitated record.  ’Edith Little, daughter of Robert Raby, by Leah Dence his wife:’  why here’s a hodge-podge!  What! have the noble Rabys intermarried with the humble Dences?”

“So it seems.  A younger son.”

“And a Raby, daughter of Dence, married a Little three hundred years ago?”

“So it seems.”

“Then what a pity this brass was not deciphered thirty years ago!  But never mind that.  All I demand is tardy justice to my protege.  Is not this a remarkable man?  By day he carves wood, and carries out a philanthropic scheme (which I mean to communicate to you this very day, together with this young man’s report); at night he forges tools that all Hillsborough can’t rival; in an interval of his work he saves a valuable life or two; in another odd moment he fights like a lion, one to four; even in his moments of downright leisure, when he is neither saving life nor taking it, he practices honorable arts, restores the fading letters of a charitable bequest, and deciphers brasses, and vastly improves his uncle’s genealogical knowledge, who, nevertheless, passed for an authority, till my Crichton stepped upon the scene.”

Raby bore all this admirably.  “You may add,” said he, “that he nevertheless finds time to correspond with his friends.  Here is a letter, addressed to Miss Carden, I declare!”