'Ambrose, sweetheart! Mother is here!'
'I'm glad on't,' said the child, in a sleepy, dreamy voice, as he turned towards her, and wound his arms round her neck.
'I'm glad on't! I thought I had lost her.'
The sound of the child's voice smote on the ears of the unhappy father, and sent a sharp thrill of pain through his heart.
Perhaps there never was a moment in his life when he felt so utterly ashamed and miserable.
He felt the great gulf which lay between him and the pure woman whom he had so cruelly deserted—a gulf, too, separating him from the child in his innocent childhood—the possession of whom he so greatly coveted. For a moment or two softer feelings got the mastery, and Ambrose Gifford stood there, under the starlit sky, almost resolved to relinquish his purpose, and leave the boy to his mother. But that better feeling soon passed, and the specious reasoning, that he was doing the best for the child to have him brought up a good Catholic, and educated as his mother could never educate him, and that the end justified the means, and that he was bound to carry out his purpose, made him say to himself, as he turned away,—
'I will do it yet, in spite of her, for the boy's salvation. Yes; by the saints I will do it!'
The next few days passed without any summons for Lucy to join the household at Penshurst.
She became restless and uneasy, fearing that, after all, she might miss what she had set her heart upon.