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BY HESBA STRETTON, AUTHOR OF "JESSICA'S FIRST PRAYER," ETC.

CHAPTER I.-HERFORD COURT.

HERFORD was one of the little seaboard parishes which encircle England; each one containing its small, grey, stormbeaten church, perched on a crag overgrown with ivy and moss, or built low down on the shore, with the moan of the sea sounding incessantly round the graves of the dead. The village of Herford consisted of a straggling street of fishermen's house, stretching in a single line from the shore inland, with scattered cottages and humble farmsteads dotted about the slopes on each side of the deep valley running down to the sea. There was no pier, and there were no lodginghouses. The nearest post town was five miles off by the nearest road-a rough and wind-swept path over the cliffs-and seven full miles if you traversed the whole length of the valley in order to reach the highway.

In every season of the year hedgerow flowers were to be found in bloom in Herford, for the valley lay open to the south, and the soft mist-laden south wind alone could breathe freely along it. There was neither biting cold in winter, nor scorching heat in summer; and the noisy, narrow rivulet, which sang and played all down its winding curves, was never parched up by drought,

VII. N.S.

and but seldom overflowed its deep banks. The bay where it emptied itself had a small ridge of pebbly beach, beyond which lay a tract of firm, bright sand, stretching in a narrow belt for miles under the cliffs when the tide was out. Almost every man in the village owned some small boat of his own, for the railway was as far off as Lowborough, and the inhabitants of Herford preferred launching their rude, safe fishing craft, and running round with the tide, to travelling along the dusty, hot highway, whenever they had any of the produce of their fields or their nets to dispose of.

The whole parish, almost to a single field, was the property of one landowner, old Richard Herford, of Herford Court, whose ancestors had dwelt there for many generations, gradually rising from the position of farmer to that of gentleman, and as gradually adding field to field, until the whole of the parish, with the small living attached to it, had come into their hands. The old man now in possession was past eighty. He had been cast in a somewhat rougher mould than his immediate forefathers, and, instead of taking any part in the affairs of the county, had led a homely, rustic life, fishing in his own boat, farming his own fields, and ruling his tenants, both farmers and fishermen, with

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a high hand. He had not married till late in life, and when his only son and heir was born he was already sixty years of age-a strong-willed, selfish man, neither able nor willing to learn any lesson disagreeable to his egotism. He idolized his boy, the son of his old age, but he did not suffer this idolatry to interfere with the supreme worship of himself. He could not have more perfectly succeeded in ruining his son by indulgence if he had set that end before him as a definite aim. Master Dick, as he was called by all the village, grew up wild, ignorant, and reckless; a torment to the men, and a terror to the women of the place. He would not go to school, and the tutors provided for him at home found him unmanageable and incorrigible; but were laughed at or scorned by his father if they made any complaint against him. "The boy can always be managed by me," he said.

Mrs. Herford, who was more than thirty years younger than her husband, had been a widow with one child when she married a second time. Until this marriage her life had been spent in large towns, chiefly in London, amid the constant bustle and stir of a populous community. She had been fascinated by the seclusion and quiet of Herford, and fancied a perpetual peace must reign there. Moreover, she was a penniless widow, dependent upon relations who kept her grudgingly; and her young son was a heavy burden to her. She was not fit to maintain herself, or at least thought so. She had never been willing to work steadily, or to do anything that might be at the moment irksome to her. When old Richard Herford had unexpectedly asked her to become his wife, she had consented with alacrity, believing that henceforth she would have her own way in everything. "Better be an old man's darling than a young man's slave," she had said to herself. But as soon as her child was born she was set on one side, and treated, even with regard to his training, as a complete cypher; being hardly more than the housekeeper of Herford Court, which from that epoch became the kingdom of the son and heir of Herford.

But the change was attended with many advantages to him. Old Richard Herford was not unkind to the fatherless boy, and in a rough fashion of his own he tried to make a man of him. He succeeded in training the town-bred lad into a capital sailor, and a still better farmer. The quiet, beautiful country life won all Justin's affections, which had so little else to cling to. The bright, changeful sea, never bearing the same aspect long; the dangerous cliffs, which he soon learned to scale with the most venturesome of the village urchins; the wild slopes of the deep valley, with their elegant birch-trees and ferns and flowers, that lived all the winter through; the large, well-stocked farmstead adjoining the Court; the Court itself, with its low, wainscotted rooms, and long, dark lobbies, and high-roofed attics set in the gables-all these took almost the place of human friendships, and awoke in his heart the strong, deep love which no one about him cared to cherish. It was a heart-breaking trial to Justin when he was banished from Herford to a school in London.

But the boy distinguished himself at school, having one object before him-that of quickly learning all he had to learn, so as to get back to his beloved Herford. He won prize after prize, bringing them home at each holiday, with a secret sense that nobody really cared for his success. His master urgently represented to his step-father that he merited a university education, and old Richard Herford consented to it, reflecting that the present vicar of Herford was an old man, and that the living was in his gift. It would probably be the cheapest and best way of providing for his wife's son. Justin cared for nothing so much as coming back to Herford. The old vicar died opportunely, and he succeeded him, having a few months before married the daughter of one of his former masters. Thus, at twenty-four years of age, he settled down for life as vicar of Herford-on-the-Sea.

There had been no great love between the half-brothers. Each regarded the other with contempt; Justin after a quiet fashion, Richard after an ostentatious one. The old man was roughly good-natured to his stepJustin Webb, her elder boy, was ten years son, but he idolized his heir. Mrs. Herford of age when his half-brother was born. He favoured sometimes one, and sometimes the was already a thoughtful, advanced lad, pre- other, according to the caprice of the moment; maturely wise from knocking about in the but her whims were of no weight with any of world during the homeless years of his the three men belonging to her, over whom mother's widowhood. He was old enough her shallow and fickle nature had no into feel a sharp pang of resentment at her fluence. The parishioners, with the excepsecond marriage; a step which throughout tion of four or five scampish young men, sushis whole after life he never fully forgave. pected of poaching, petty larcenies, and

similar misdemeanours, were all strongly attached to Master Justin, the quiet, pleasant lad who had grown up among them, and who was now their own young, friendly parson, not over strict, and not too long in his sermons. Master Richard had grown up among them also, but he was headstrong and domineering, and there was a secret dread of his succession to the estates, which could not be very far off now, and which was looked forward to as a great though inevitable calamity to the whole parish.

CHAPTER II.-OLD RICHARD HERFORD.

If it were possible for us to take our last journey as we take other journeys, half the terror of it would be gone. We shrink more, perhaps, from going alone than from entering into an utterly unknown state of existence. Could we only say to one or two of our dearest, most familiar friends, "Come, I will bid good-bye to this world next week if you will go with me. Let us hasten to that better land, of which we have so often spoken, and so often heard, in our hours of sorrow," then we might set about our preparations for that great migration with an unusual courage and cheerfulness, as if we were merely flitting to some new home across the seas. But we are called to pass singly to that far-off, mysterious shore in darkness and silence, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, knowing nothing. Against our will we are stripped of all our customary surroundings, even of the outer self, so much better known to most of us than the hidden, lonely, living soul, which alone has to pass the unseen boundary. It is not change that daunts us; it is the utter, absolute strangeness of that future world, and of our place and bearing in it.

As might have been foreseen, as soon as Richard was but little more than a boy, his strong, uncurbed will came into frequent collision with the strong, uncurbed will of his aged father. Old Richard Herford grew more obstinate and tyrannical as he advanced in years, and began to sink under the infirmities of his great age. His increasing deafness and dimness of sight made him increasingly suspicious and unreasonable. On the other hand, his son could not submit to any control, and it was enough for him to know that his father had forbidden a thing to cause him ardently to desire to do it. Time after time violent quarrels arose, in which Justin played the part of peacemaker, the old man being always more readily pacified than his son. But there could be no lasting peace between them. Threats were constantly bandied to and fro; on the one hand of disinheritance, on the other of running away, and never more being heard of. At length young Richard put his threat into execution. When he was little over eighteen he disappeared suddenly and completely, and no inquiry or search availed to procure a solitary trace of him. Some of the fishermen whispered that he must have been seized with cramp whilst bathing, and been carried away by the tide; but there was no evidence to support this suggestion, and it did not re-than venture into the thick darkness he was ceive a moment's credence at the Court. Old Richard Herford knew, though he never betrayed the secret, that a large sum of money had disappeared from the cabinet in his bedroom at the same time as his hopeful

son.

The extreme age of old Richard Herford, standing on the brink of the grave one January night, did not make the strangeness of the change less painful to him. He had lived so long in this life that the brief, fleeting visions one catches now and then of another world must long since have ceased to visit him, if, indeed, they had ever visited him at all. The curtain had become darker and more closely drawn between him and the world to come. He was clinging with fierce tenacity to the worn-out, half paralyzed frame which had been his tenement so long. If he might have his will, he would rather remain thus, bed-ridden and barely alive,

about to enter. His white head tossed to and fro on his pillow, and he groaned impatiently. How poor and short a time it was since he was a boy! It did not seem long since he was a lad scrambling up Halstone Cliff, and hanging by strong young Two other events had chequered the some- hands to any jutting crag or root of ivy, what monotonous life of the young vicar of whilst the tide roared far below him against Herford-the birth of a little daughter, and the rocks. He had been dreaming a good the death, a few months later, of his wife, deal of his boyhood of late, going back to who was some years older than himself, and the smallest memories of childish trifles. who might be said to have chosen and mar-Was it a token that his worn-out, sickly spirit ried him rather than he her. Both of these was about to enter into some new youth? events took place three or four years before Richard's disappearance.

There was no trace of youth in his withered, yellow face, or in the hands, with their hooked

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