The Birthright

And now I have told my tale, told it truly in spite of evil reports and foul lies. Let Richard Tresidder and his son Nick, who are both alive, and who, I trust, will read what I have written, point to one wrong statement. This they cannot do.

It may be that I have acted foolishly, but let God be the judge whether I have ever struck an unfair blow. I have written these things that the truth might be known, and that no shadow should rest on her who is near me even now; ay, and who is more beautiful than when I first saw her in Truro: she the pure maid with pity shining from her eyes, and I the outcast, the vagabond.

I sit in the library at Pennington as I write this, while my love is romping with the grandest lad in the world, save my eldest son Jasper, whom I hear shouting to his sister Naomi in the garden, while Eli, the dwarf, watches over them as tenderly as if they were his own.

THE END

1

Lanherne Manor House, in the parish of Mawgan, Cornwall, while being a centre of Catholic influence for several centuries, did not become a recognised convent until the beginning of the present century. At that time a sisterhood of Carmelite nuns was driven from France to Antwerp. When the French entered Belgium they emigrated to England, and Lord Arundell of Wardour assigned the house to them. The inmates are at present an abbess and twenty nuns. J. H.