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Rh said Dickie seriously. "I did like you most awfully, even then. You are very like the Lady Arden whose husband was shut up in the Tower for the Gunpowder Plot."

"So they tell me," said Lady Talbot, "but how do you know it?"

"I don't know," said Dickie confused, "but you are like her."

"You must have seen a portrait of her. There's one in the National Portrait Gallery. She was a Delamere, and my name was Delamere, too, before I was married. She was one of the same family, you see, dear."

Dickie put his arms round her waist as she sat beside him, and laid his head on her shoulder.

"I wish you'd really been my mother," he said, and his thoughts were back in the other days with the mother who wore a ruff and hoop. Lady Talbot hugged him tenderly.

"My dear little Dickie," she said, "you don't wish it as much as I do."

"There are all sorts of things a chap can't be sure of—things you mustn't tell any one. Secrets, you know—honourable secrets. But if it was your own mother it would be different. But if you haven't got a mother you have to decide everything for yourself."

"Won't you let me help you?" she asked.

Dickie, his head on her shoulder, was for one wild moment tempted to tell her everything the whole story, from beginning to end. But he knew that she could not understand it—or even believe it. No grown-up person could. A