Blunt and bluff Captain Holt, white-whiskered and white-haired now, but strong and hearty, gave her another and a different shock.  What his first words would be when they met and how she would avoid discussing the subject uppermost in their minds if, in his rough way, he insisted on talking about it, was one of the things that had worried her greatly when she decided to come home, for there was never any doubt in her mind as to his knowledge.  But she misjudged the captain, as had a great many others who never looked beneath the rugged bark covering his heart of oak.

“I’m glad you’ve come at last,” he said gravely, hardly touching her hand in welcome, “you ought to have been here before.  Jane’s got a fine lad of her own that she’s bringin’ up; when you know him ye’ll like him.”

She did not look at him when she answered, but a certain feeling of relief crept over her.  She saw that the captain had buried the past and intended never to revive it.

The stern look on his face only gave way when little Ellen came to him of her own accord and climbing up into his lap said in her broken English that she heard he was a great captain and that she wanted him to tell her some stories like her good papa used to tell her.  “He was gray like you,” she said, “and big,” and she measured the size with her plump little arms that showed out of her dainty French dress.

With Doctor John and Captain Holt out of the way Lucy’s mind was at rest.  “Nobody else round about Yardley except these two knows,” she kept saying to herself with a bound of relief, “and for these I don’t care.  The doctor is Jane’s slave, and the captain is evidently wise enough not to uncover skeletons locked up in his own closet.”

These things settled in her mind, my lady gave herself up to whatever enjoyment, compatible with her rapidly fading mourning, the simple surroundings afforded, taking her cue from the conditions that confronted her and ordering her conduct accordingly and along these lines:  Archie was her adopted nephew, the son of an old friend of Jane’s, and one whom she would love dearly, as, in fact, she would anybody else whom Jane had brought up; she herself was a gracious widow of large means recovering from a great sorrow; one who had given up the delights of foreign courts to spend some time among her dear people who had loved her as a child.  Here for a time would she bring up and educate her daughter.

“To be once more at home, and in dear old Warehold, too!” she had said with upraised Madonna-like eyes and clasped hands to a group of women who were hanging on every word that dropped from her pretty lips.  “Do you know what that is to me?  There is hardly a day I have not longed for it.  Pray, forgive me if I do not come to see you as often as I would, but I really hate to be an hour outside of the four walls of my precious home.”

CHAPTER XV