A Blot on the Scutcheon

by Mabel Winifred Knowles

Ah! he was so different.

The tambour frame lay in her lap, with her fingers idle a-top of it, having given up the battle with frayed silks.

She was dreaming of grey eyes.

Michael! Michael!

The birds at the lattice window were singing the sweet refrain of his name.

Michael! Michael!

Yes, he was her lover—the only one for her in the wide world.

He had come to her in childhood, a lean, untidy lad, with laughing eyes and hair all awry; but, as he knelt on one knee at her feet, she had chosen him there and then as her true knight for ever and ever.

Then the long years rolled between till the day when she stood alone, sighing for a lover, jealous, perhaps, of the songs of mating birds in the spring woods around.

And he had come to her again.