Richard de Ashby smoothed his brow, and calmed his look, as he crossed from a tavern, where he had been making some inquiries, to a house on the opposite side of the street, not very far from the gates of the castle. It was a large stone building--close to an old church which then stood on that part of the hill--and as it contained several habitations, the entrance of the common staircase was, as usual in such circumstances, left open.

Ascending cautiously, guided by a rope, which passing through iron rings followed the tortuous course of the staircase, Richard de Ashby reached the first floor, and knocked at a small door on his right hand. Nobody appeared, and after waiting for several minutes; he knocked again.

This time he was more successful, the door was opened by a small strange-looking being, dressed in the garb of an old woman, with a brown and wrinkled face, and little, bright, grey eyes. She held a lamp in her hand, and gazing upon the countenance of the visitor with a keen and not very placable look, she asked--"What do you want?"

"I want Father Mark," replied Richard de Ashby.

"He is out visiting the sick," said the old dame.--"Nay, now," she continued, in a petulant tone, "I will answer all your questions at once, before you can put them. They all run in the same round. Father Mark is out--I don\'t know where he is gone--I don\'t know when he\'ll come home.--If you want to see him here, you must come again--If you want him to come to any sick man, you must leave word where.--Now you have it all."

Richard de Ashby had some acquaintance with the world, and fancied that he knew perfectly the character of the person before him. Drawing out, therefore, a small French piece of gold, called an aignel, he slipped it into the old woman\'s hand, who instantly held it to the lamp, crying, "What\'s this--what\'s this?--Gold, as I live! Mary mother! you are a civil gentleman, my son. What is it that you want?"

"Simply an answer to a question," said Richard de Ashby: "Is there a young lady staying here--a pretty young lady--called Kate Greenly? You know her, methinks,--do you not?"

"Know her? to be sure I do," replied the old woman. "A blessing upon her pretty heart, she\'s been up here many a time, and I\'ve carried a message for her before now; and she gave me some silver pieces, and a bodkin--I\'ve got it somewhere about me now," and she began to feel in her bodice for poor Kate Greenly\'s gift.

"Then is she not here now?" said Richard de Ashby.

"No, no," answered the old woman, "she was here an hour before sunset, but she went away again. Oh, I know how it is!" she cried, as if a sudden thought had struck her--"you are the gentleman whom good Father Mark has been preaching to her to run away from, because you are living in a state of naughtiness. These friars are so hard upon young folks; and now you\'d give another gold piece, like this, I\'d swear, to know where she is, and get her to come back again."

"Ay, would I," replied Richard de Ashby, "two."

"Well, well," continued the old woman, "I know something, if I choose to say. She is not in Nottingham, but not far off."

"Can you show me where she is?" demanded Richard de Ashby.

"Not to-night--not to-night!" cried the old woman. "Sancta Maria! I would not go out to-night all that way--not for a purse full of gold. Why it is up, after you get out of the gates, through Back Lane, and down the Thorny Walk till you come to the edge of Thorny Wood, and then you turn to the right by old Gaffer Brown\'s cottage, and, round under the chapel, and along by the bank where the fountain is, and then up by the new planting, just between it and the fern hill; and then if you go straight on, and take the first to the left, and the fourth to the right, it brings you to old Sweeting\'s hut, where she has gone to live with him, and his good dame."

Richard de Ashby saw no possible means of discovering the way from the old lady\'s description, and he was about to propose some other means of arranging the affair, when, with a shrewd wink of the eye, she said--"I am going out to her in the grey of the morning myself, and if you have any message to send her, I can take it; or, if a gentleman chooses to wait at the gate, and walk into the country after an old woman, who can help it?--I mustn\'t go with you through the town, you know, for that would make a scandal."

"I understand--I understand!" said Richard; "and if by your means I get her back again, you shall have two gold pieces such as that."

"Oh, an open hand gets all it wants," replied the priest\'s maid--"a close fist keeps what it has got; an open hand gets all it wants. \'Tis a true proverb, Sir Knight--\'tis a true proverb. At the north gate, you know, in the grey of the morning. Wait till you see me come out with my basket, and then don\'t say a word, but come after."

"You are going to her, then?" asked Richard de Ashby.

"Yes, yes," said the old woman, impatiently; "I am going to carry her news, from the good father, of all that happens at the Castle to-night. But go along, now--go along! I am afraid of his coming back and finding you here: then he might think something, you know. At the north gate in the grey of the morning."

"I will not fail," replied Richard de Ashby, and turning away, he slowly descended the stairs.

The old woman paused not to look after him, but closed the door, muttering and talking to herself.

The life of Richard de Ashby had arrived at one of those moments so fearful, so terrible, in the career of wickedness, when one offence following another has accumulated scheme upon scheme, each implying new crimes, and new dangers, and each, though intended to guard the other, offering, like the weakened frontier of an over extended empire, but new points of peril, but fresh necessity of defence.

"\'Tis unfortunate," he thought, as he turned from the door--"\'tis unfortunate that I have not found her; but she is absent from the city, and that is one point gained."

The moment, however, that his mind had thus cast off the thought of Kate Greenly, and the secret she possessed, it turned with maddening rapidity to all the other points of his situation.

"What shall I do with the body?" he asked himself. "I cannot let it lie and rot there.--I wonder how fares my cousin Alured? He has surely drank the wine. Oh, yes; I know him, he has drank it, and more too.--If that man Ellerby were not hovering round about, all might be secure still."

The word still showed better than any other the state of his mind, though he hid it from himself. He knew, in short, that he was anything but secure. Over his head hung the awful cloud of coming detection and punishment. He saw it with his eyes, he felt it in his heart, that the tempest was about to descend; and, as those who, in a thunderstorm, gallop away from the flashing lightning, are said to draw it more surely on their own heads, so his desperate efforts to save himself, only called down more surely the approaching retribution.

The next minute his mind reverted to the corpse again. "This carrion of Dighton," he thought; "it were well, perhaps, to dare the thing openly--to give him a simple but a public funeral--to call the priests to aid, and pay them well. With them, one is always sure to get a good word for one\'s money.--\'Tis but to say he was brought to my house in my absence, and died there while I was away. What have I to do with his death? \'Tis no affair of mine.--I will hie up to the castle, and spy what is going on. Oh, that I could prove that Alured has drank wine or broken bread in the room of Hugh de Monthermer!--That were a stroke indeed! But, at all events, he has been with him. Who can tell how a man may be poisoned? \'Tis at all events suspicious, that he should be with him just before his death.--I will not go into the court; I will just look through the gates, and speak with the warder for a moment or two. The gates are not closed till nine." And thus saying, he retrod his steps to the castle gate.

When he reached it there was nobody there; but as he............