"Yes," said Greville Hampton, as if assenting to his own thoughts, after he had drained the antique silver tankard, and fixed his eyes for a moment upon the shield argent, with three choughs, gules, engraved thereon, and the crested chough that surmounted a coronet with the motto Clarior e Tenebris (Brighter from Obscurity), "yes, may the words be ominous of good! If I could but think that Derval would certainly be rich, and should never know the privations we have suffered and the deprivations to which we have been subjected, I think, Mary, I could die happy."
"The same repining thoughts still, Greville!" said Mary, softly and entreatingly.
"Yes, still, Mary."
"Derval," said she, as she resumed her knitting, "has his youth and all his life before him."
"But without some effort on my part it will be a life of half penury and whole obscurity in Finglecombe. But how is that effort to be made? You would not have our boy grow up the associate and companion of these villagers and lace-makers! Among whom else will his lot be cast? I would rather see him in his grave, Mary."
"Do not say so. The misfortunes you have undergone have made you unreasonably bitter; but let us hope, Greville, for the best," she added, running her slender fingers caressingly through his thick dark hair.
"Bitter! unreasonable! Have I not been mulcted of my proper inheritance? Is not the position—the rank which ought to have been mine and my father's before me—now held by another? Have I not been robbed by fashionable gamesters, swindlers, and false friends!"
"Yet it is for such society as those that you repine!"
"It is not so, Mary; what happened once could never happen again. I know better now."
"The man who calls himself Lord Oakhampton——"