THE WALNUT-TREE



  Mistress Jean was making the elder-flower wine--
  'And what brings the
  Laird at sic a like time?'
                              LADY NAIRN, THE LAIRD OF COCKPEN


Summer was nearly ended, and Lucy Thistlewood was presiding in the great
kitchen of the Manor-house, standing under the latticed window near
the large oak-table, a white apron over her dress, presiding over the
collecting of elder-berries for the brew of household-wine for the
winter. The maids stood round her with an array of beechen bowls or red
and yellow crocks, while barefooted, bareheaded children came thronging
in with rush or wicker baskets of the crimson fruit, which the maids
poured in sanguine cascades into their earthenware; and Lucy requited
with substantial slices of bread and cheese, and stout homely garment
mostly of her own sewing.

Lucy was altogether an inmate of her father's house. She had not even
been at Hurst Walwyn for many months; for her step-mother's reiterated
hopes that Berenger would make her his consolation for all he had
suffered from his French spouse rendered it impossible to her to meet
him with sisterly unconsciousness; and she therefore kept out of the
way, and made herself so useful at home, that Dame Annora only wondered
how it had been possible to spare her so long, and always wound up her
praises by saying, that Berenger would learn in time how lucky he had
been to lose the French puppet, and win the good English housewife.

If only tidings would have come that the puppet was safe married. That
was the crisis which all the family desired yet feared for Berenger,
since nothing else they saw would so detach his thoughts from the past
as the leave him free to begin life again. The relapse brought on by the
cruel reply to Osbert's message had been very formidable: he was long
insensible or delirious and then came a state of annihilated thought,
then of frightfully sensitive organs, when light, sound, movement, or
scent were alike agony; and when he slowly revived, it was with such
sunken spiri