angered him.  She never learned to speak English very well, but he would suffer her to talk in no other tongue before him.  Still, when he was not there she spoke in Spanish, of which language, however, I alone of the family became a master—­and that more because of certain volumes of old Spanish romances which she had by her, than for any other reason.  From my earliest childhood I was fond of such tales, and it was by bribing me with the promise that I should read them that she persuaded me to learn Spanish.  For my mother’s heart still yearned towards her old sunny home, and often she would talk of it with us children, more especially in the winter season, which she hated as I do.  Once I asked her if she wished to go back to Spain.  She shivered and answered no, for there dwelt one who was her enemy and would kill her; also her heart was with us children and our father.  I wondered if this man who sought to kill my mother was the same as he of whom my father had spoken as ’the chief of the devils,’ but I only answered that no man could wish to kill one so good and beautiful.

‘Ah! my boy,’ she said, ’it is just because I am, or rather have been, beautiful that he hates me.  Others would have wedded me besides your dear father, Thomas.’  And her face grew troubled as though with fear.

Now when I was eighteen and a half years old, on a certain evening in the month of May it happened that a friend of my father’s, Squire Bozard, late of the Hall in this parish, called at the Lodge on his road from Yarmouth, and in the course of his talk let it fall that a Spanish ship was at anchor in the Roads, laden with merchandise.  My father pricked up his ears at this, and asked who her captain might be.  Squire Bozard answered that he did not know his name, but that he had seen him in the market-place, a tall and stately man, richly dressed, with a handsome face and a scar upon his temple.

At this news my mother turned pale beneath her olive skin, and muttered in Spanish: 

‘Holy Mother! grant that it be not he.’

My father also looked frightened, and questioned the squire closely as to the man’s appearance, but without learning anything more.  Then he bade him adieu with little ceremony, and taking horse rode away for Yarmouth.

That night my mother never slept, but sat all through it in her nursing chair, brooding over I know not what.  As I left her when I went to my bed, so I found her when I came from it at dawn.  I can remember well pushing the door ajar to see her face glimmering white in the twilight of the May morning, as she sat, her large eyes fixed upon the lattice.

‘You have risen early, mother,’ I said.

‘I have never lain down, Thomas,’ she answered.

‘Why not?  What do you fear?’

’I fear the past and the future, my son.  Would that your father were back.’

About ten o’clock of that morning, as I was making ready to walk into Bungay to the house of that physician under whom I was learning the art of healing, my father rode up.  My mother, who was watching at the lattice, ran out to meet him.