Richard’s voice was heard in the hall.

There was commotion all over the house at the return of the young heir.  Berry, seizing every possible occasion to approach his Bessy now that her involuntary coldness had enhanced her value—­“Such is men!” as the soft woman reflected—­Berry ascended to her and delivered the news in pompous tones and wheedling gestures.  “The best word you’ve spoke for many a day,” says she, and leaves him unfee’d, in an attitude, to hurry and pour bliss into Lucy’s ears.

“Lord be praised!” she entered the adjoining room exclaiming, “we’re got to be happy at last.  They men have come to their senses.  I could cry to your Virgin and kiss your Cross, you sweet!”

“Hush!” Lucy admonished her, and crooned over the child on her knees.  The tiny open hands, full of sleep, clutched; the large blue eyes started awake; and his mother, all trembling and palpitating, knowing, but thirsting to hear it, covered him with her tresses, and tried to still her frame, and rocked, and sang low, interdicting even a whisper from bursting Mrs. Berry.

Richard had come.  He was under his father’s roof, in the old home that had so soon grown foreign to him.  He stood close to his wife and child.  He might embrace them both:  and now the fulness of his anguish and the madness of the thing he had done smote the young man:  now first he tasted hard earthly misery.

Had not God spoken to him in the tempest?  Had not the finger of heaven directed him homeward?  And he had come:  here he stood:  congratulations were thick in his ears:  the cup of happiness was held to him, and he was invited to drink of it.  Which was the dream? his work for the morrow, or this?  But for a leaden load that he felt like a bullet in his breast, he might have thought the morrow with death sitting on it was the dream.  Yes; he was awake.  Now first the cloud of phantasms cleared away:  he beheld his real life, and the colours of true human joy:  and on the morrow perhaps he was to close his eyes on them.  That leaden bullet dispersed all unrealities.

They stood about him in the hall, his father, Lady Blandish, Mrs. Doria, Adrian, Ripton; people who had known him long.  They shook his hand:  they gave him greetings he had never before understood the worth of or the meaning.  Now that he did they mocked him.  There was Mrs. Berry in the background bobbing, there was Martin Berry bowing, there was Tom Bakewell grinning.  Somehow he loved the sight of these better.

“Ah, my old Penelope!” he said, breaking through the circle of his relatives to go to her.  “Tom! how are you?”

“Bless ye, my Mr, Richard,” whimpered Mrs. Berry, and whispered, rosily, “all’s agreeable now.  She’s waiting up in bed for ye, like a new-born.”