It was a clear autumn night, still and cloudless. The mists of evening had rolled away from moorland and meadow,—from the dark brown fields where the plough had been busy, and the long line of rippling water. The moon was as bright and full as on that first night of Maurice Clissold’s sojourn at Borcel. He had been told that on such a night as this Muriel was wont to be restless.

‘Now if that poor ghost of days departed will but haunt my room to-night, I may gather some shred of information from her disjointed talk,’ he said to himself.

But the night wore away while he lay awake and watchful, and there was no sound of slippered footfall in the corridor, no opening of the creaking old door. Mr. Clissold fell asleep at last, when the moon had vanished, and did not wake till ever so long after the Borcel End breakfast-hour.

This was disappointing, but he waited another day, and watched another night, with the same result.

‘If she doesn’t come to-night I give it up,’ he said to himself. ‘After all, there can be but little for me to gather from her rambling self-communion.’

He slept for an hour or two on the third afternoon, and thus on the third night of his watch was more wakeful than before. The nights were moon-light still, but the moon rose later, and had lost her full brightness.

He lay awake for three hours on this particular night, and heard not a sound, save the occasional scufflings, patterings, and squealings of mice behind the wainscot. But a few minutes after the eight-day clock in the hall had struck two, the watcher heard the sound that had startled him at his first coming—the slipshod footfall—the slow, ghost-like tread on the uncarpeted floor of the corridor.

Muriel was approaching.

She entered slowly—quietly—as before, and went straight to the window, which she opened noiselessly, taking infinite pains to avoid all sound. Then, kneeling on the window-seat, she put her head out of the window, and looked downward, as if she were watching some one below.

‘Be careful, love,’ she exclaimed, in a whisper just loud enough to reach Maurice’s attentive ear, ‘that root of ivy is loose. I’m afraid your foot will slip. Be careful!’

For some time she remained thus, holding imaginary communion with some one below. Then all at once she awoke to a sense of her solitude, and knew that she had been talking to a phantom. She drew back into the room, and began to walk up and down rapidly, with a distracted air, her hands clasped upon her head, as if by that pressure upon her temples she would have stilled the trouble within her brain.

‘They told me he was dead,’ she said to herself; ‘murdered, barbarously murdered. But there was no truth in it. They have told me other lies as well as that. They are all false, all cruel. My mother has made them so. She has taken away my husband. She has taken away my child. She has left me nothing but memory. Why did she not take that away? I should be happy—yes, quite happy, sitting by the fire and singing all day long, or roaming about among the hazel bushes, and the old apple-trees in the wilderness, if I did not remember. But I look down at my empty arms and remember that my blessed child ought to be lying in them, and then I hate her. Yes, I hate the mother that bore me.’

All this was said in disjointed gushes of quick, eager speech, divided by intervals of silence.

Suddenly she burst into a shrill laugh.

‘Who says he is dead?’ she cried. ‘Don’t I see him every moonlight night when I can come here? They shut me up mostly, lock all their doors, and keep me prisoner. Cruel—cruel—cruel. But he is standing under the window all the same, whenever the moon shines. He is there, waiting for me to open my window, like Romeo. Yes, that’s what he said, “like Romeo.”’

Then with an entire change of tone, a change to deepest tenderness, mingled with a remorseful fear, she went on, as if speaking to her lover.

‘Love, it was very wrong of us to break our promise. I fear that harm will come of it. My mind is full of fear.’

After this came a long silence. She went back to the window, knelt upon the broad wooden seat laid her head upon the sill, and remained motionless, speechless.

Maurice fancied she was weeping.

This continued for nearly an hour; then with a sudden movement—all her movements were sudden—she started up and looked about the room, as if in quest of something.

Maurice had left his extinguished candle on the dressing-table, with a box of matches in the candlestick. Quick as thought, Muriel seized the box, struck a match, and lighted the candle, and then hurried from the room.

The watcher sprang from the bed where he had been lying hidden by the shadow of the curtains, and followed that retiring figure, full of apprehension.

A confirmed lunatic rushing about an old timber house with a lighted candle was not the safest of people, and Maurice held himself responsible for any harm that might happen in consequence of Muriel’s liberty.

When he emerged from his room the corridor was empty, but the gleam of the candle in the distance guided his hurried steps. At the end of the corridor there was a winding stair—a stair which he had never ascended—but which he understood to lead to certain disused garrets in the roof.

It was from this narrow stair that the light came, and hither Maurice hastened. He was just in time to see the edge of Muriel’s white drapery flutter for an instant on the topmost stair before it vanished, and the light with it.

He rushed up the stairs, knocking his head against a heavy cross-beam in the course of his swift ascent, and almost stunning himself; but even that blow did not make him pause. He staggered on to the last step, and found himself in a kind of cavern, which in the dim light of the waning moon looked to him like the hold of a ship turned upside down. Ponderous beams crossed each other in every direction—the faint moonshine streamed through a broken skylight—cobwebs and dust hung all around, and in one corner of this deserted loft a few articles of furniture were crowded together, shrouded from the dust by some old patchwork coverlets. Even this loft had doubtless been kept in good order so long as that vigilant housewife, Bridget Trevanard had been able to attend to her domestic duties.

Muriel was kneeling near this shrouded heap of discarded furniture—kneeling by an old-fashioned basket-work cradle. She held the candlestick in one hand, and seemed to be searching for something in the cradle with the other hand. Her head was bent, her brow contracted, and she was muttering to herself as she groped among the tumbled blankets and discoloured linen which had once made the warm nest of some idolized infant. Her own nest, most likely.

Maurice stopped short. To startle her in such a moment might be dangerous. Better for him to hold his peace, and keep a watch upon her movements, ready to rush to the rescue, should there be peril.

Presently she seemed to have found what she wanted. It was a letter, in a sealed envelope, which she looked at and kissed, but made no attempt to open. She replaced this presently in the cradle, and took out more letters, two or three together, open, and these she kissed, looking long and fixedly at the written lines, as if she were trying to read them, but could not.

‘My love, my love,’ she murmured. ‘Your own true words—nothing but death could part us. Death has parted us. Yes, death! They told me you were dead. And yet that can’t be true. The dead are spirits. If you were dead you would hover near me. I should see your blessed shade. I should——’

Her eyes, wandering slowly from the letter, penetrated that dusky corner where Maurice stood watching her. She saw him—gave one long, wild shriek—and sprang towards him.

To her excited imagination that dark and silent form seemed the ghost of her dead lover.

She had thrown the candlestick from her as she sprang to her feet. The candle rolled from its socket and fell upon her long night-dress. A moment, and she stood before Maurice’s affrighted sight a pillar of flame.

He flew to her, clasped her in his arms, and trampled on the candle, dragged one of the loose coverings from the furniture, and rolled her in it tightly, firmly, extinguishing the flames in his vigorous grasp. The peril, the horror, had been but momentary, yet he feared the shock might be fatal. The frail form shivered in his arms. The tender flesh had been scorched.

Even in that moment of terror she still believed him to be her lover.

‘Not a spirit!’ she murmured. ‘Not the shadow of the dead, but living, and returned to me, to rescue, to cherish! Oh, George, is it really you?’

It was the first time he had heard her utter George Penwyn’s name.

‘It is one who will protect and cherish you,’ Maurice said, tenderly. ‘One whom you may trust and cling to in all confidence, one who will restore your daughter to you.’

‘My daughter, my baby girl!’ she cried. ‘No? you can never do that on earth; in heaven we shall meet again, perhaps, and know each other, but never in this life. She was taken away from me, and they murdered her.’

‘No; she was given into safe hands, she was loved and cared for. Years have passed since then, and she has grown up into a beautiful young woman. You shall see her again, live with her, and she will love and honour you.’

‘I don’t want her, I want my lovely baby, the little child they took away from me. The baby that lay in my arms, and clung to my breast for one short hour before it was taken away.’

She shuddered, and a faint moan broke from her lips.

‘You are in pain,’ said Maurice.

‘Yes, the fire is burning still. It scorches me to the heart.’

He took her up in his arms with infinite tenderness, and carried her across the loft, and down the narrow stair, making his way amidst those massive cross-beams, and by those steep steps with extreme caution, lighted only by the pale glimmer of a fading moon.

Once at the bottom of the stairs, and in the broad corridor, his way was easy enough. He carried his light burden through the silent house, across the empty hall, to old Mrs. Trevanard’s room. Here he laid her gently on the sofa before awaking the blind grandmother. He found a candle on the table, and a match-box on the mantelpiece, and was soon provided with a light.

His first look was at Muriel. She had fainted, and lay motionless where he had placed her—white and death-like.

He went to Mrs. Trevanard’s bedside, and woke her gently.

‘Dear Mrs. Trevanard, there has been an accident. Your granddaughter is hurt; not seriously, I trust, but the shock has made her faint. Will you give her some kind of restorative, while I go and call the servants?’

He left the room for this purpose, hurried to the end of the house where he had been told the servants slept, in a room over the kitchen, knocked at the door of this room, and told one of the girls to get up and dress herself as fast as she could, and come to Mrs. Trevanard’s room without a moment’s loss of time. This done, he hastened back to Muriel, and found the blind grandmother administering to her—holding a glass containing some cordial of her own concoction to the white lips of the sufferer.

‘Why did you persuade me to leave my do............