April. And a fine spring evening.

The weeks have gone on since that miserable January time, bringing but little change to Coastdown or to those in it. Robert Hunter rested in his grave, uninquired for--though as to the word "rested" more hereafter--and Cyril Thornycroft had never returned. Lady Ellis had died in Cheltenham only a week after she went back to it.

That Cyril\'s remaining away so long and his not writing was singular in the extreme, no one doubted. Mr. Thornycroft grew uneasy, saying over and over again that some accident must have happened to him. Richard, however, had his private theory on the point, which he did not tell to the world. He believed now that Cyril and Hunter had returned that night together; that Cyril had witnessed the deliberate shot, had put off to the ship, and in his condemnation of the act would not come home to the Red Court so long as he, Richard, was in it.

But Richard could not tell this to his father, and Mr. Thornycroft one morning suddenly ordered his son Isaac abroad--to France, to Holland, to Flanders--to every place and town, in fact, where there was the least probability of Cyril\'s being found. The illicit business they had been engaged in caused them to have relations with several places on the Continent, and Cyril might be at any one of them. Isaac had but now returned--returned as he went, neither seeing nor hearing aught of Cyril. It was beginning to be more than singular. Surely if Cyril were within postal bounds of communication with England, he would write!

The supposition, held from the first that he had gone off in the smuggling boats to the ship that night, and sailed with her on her homeward voyage, was far more probable than it might seem to strangers. Richard and Isaac had each done the same more than once; as, in his younger days had Mr. Thornycroft, thereby causing no end of alarm; to his wife. Cyril, it is true, was quite different in disposition, not at all given to wild rovings; but they had assumed the fact, and been easy. Richard, unwillingly, but with a view to ease her suspense, imparted the theory he had recently adopted to his sister; and she thought he might be right. As Mary Anne observed to her own heart, it was a miserable business altogether, looked at from any point.

No direct confidence had been reposed in Isaac. Richard shrank from it. Isaac had many estimable qualities, although he helped to cheat Her Majesty\'s revenue, and thought it glorious fun. But he could not avoid entertaining suspicions of his brother, and one day he asked a question. "Never mind," shortly replied Richard; "Hunter got his deserts." It was no direct avowal, but Isaac drew his own conclusions, and was awfully shocked. He was as different from Richard in mind, in disposition, in the view he took of things in general, as light is from dark. The blow to Isaac was dreadful. He could not, so to say, lift up his head from it; it lay on him like an incubus. Now, the coldness with which Anna had ever since treated him was explained, satisfactorily enough to his own mind. As a murderer\'s brother, her avoidance of him was only natural. No doubt she was overwhelmed with horror at being tied to him. If he could but have divined that she suspected him! But they were all going in for mistakes; Isaac amongst the rest.

As if the real sorrow, the never-ceasing apprehension under which some of them lived, were not enough to bear, rumours were about to arise of an unreal one.

On this evening, in early April, Miss Thornycroft was alone. As she paced her parlour, in the stately mourning robes of black silk and crape, ostensibly worn for her stepmother, the blight that had fallen on her spirit and her heart might be traced in her countenance. The untimely and dreadful fate of Robert Hunter, to whom she had been so passionately attached, was ever present to her; the false part she had played at the inquest reddened her brow with shame; the guilt of her brother Richard haunted her dreams. She would start up in fright from sleep, seeing the officers of justice coming to apprehend him; she would fancy sometimes she saw her father taken, preparatory to the illicit practices he had carried on being investigated before a criminal tribunal. Mingling with this--worse, if possible, than the rest--was the keenest weight of self-reproach. She could not hide from herself, and no longer tried to do it, that her own deliberate disobedience had brought it all about--all, all! But for flying in the face of her father\'s express commands, in not stopping the visit of Robert Hunter, he had been living now, and Richard\'s hand guiltless.

All this was telling upon Mary Anne Thornycroft. You would scarcely know her, pacing the lonely drawing-room, pale and sad, for the blooming, high-spirited, haughty girl of two months before. Her father and Richard had gone to London on business, Isaac was out, she knew not where, and she was alone. Her thoughts were dwelling on that fatal night--when were they ever absent from it?--and were becoming, as they sometimes did, unbearable. A nervous feeling came creeping over her; it had done so at times of late, fearless though she was by nature: a horror of being alone; a dread of her own lonely self; of the lonely room and its two candles; an imperative demand for companionship. She opened the door, and glided across the hall and lighted passages to the kitchen, framing an excuse as she went.

"Sinnett, will you--where\'s Sinnett?"

The maids, three of whom were present, stood up at her entrance. They had been seated at the table making household linen.

"Sinnett is upstairs, miss. Shall I call her?"

"No; she will be down directly, I dare say. I\'ll wait."

At that moment a sort of wild noise, half shriek, half howl, long-continued and ever-recurring, arose from without--at a distance as yet. Mary Anne Thornycroft turned her ear to listen, her face blanching with dread fear; the least thing was sufficient to excite fear now.

The sounds approached nearer: they seemed to come from one in the very extremity of terror, and, just then Sinnett entered the kitchen. Perhaps it has not been forgotten that the windows, of modern date, looked on the side walk, and thence towards the church and village. The shutters were not yet closed, the blinds not drawn down. In another instant, as the frightened women stood together in a group, one window was flung up, and a form propelled itself in, smashing a pane of glass. It proved to be Joe, the carter\'s boy; a sensitive, delicate lad, who had recently lost his mother, and was a favourite at the Red Court Farm. He lay for a moment amidst the shivers of glass, then rose up and clasped tight hold of Sinnett, his white face and shivering frame betokening some extraordinary cause of terror.

They put him in a chair, and held him there, he clinging to them. Miss Thornycroft authoritatively stopped all questions until he should be calmer. Sinnett brought him some wine, and the boy tried to sip it; but he could not keep his teeth still, and he bit a piece out of the glass. He looked over his shoulder at the window perpetually in ghastly fear, so one of the servants closed and barred the shutters. By degrees, he brought out that he had "seen a ghost."

Ghosts were rather favourite appendages to Coastdown, as we have read. They were not less implicitly believed in by the lower classes (not to bring in others) than they used to be, so the maids screamed and drew nearer Joe. This ghost, however, was not the old ghost of the plateau; as the boy is explaining, sobbing between whiles; but--Robert Hunter\'s.

"Nonsense!" reproved Sinnett. "Don\'t you be a coward, Joe, but just speak up and tell your tale sensibly. Come!"

"I went for the newspaper to Captain Copp\'s, as sent," answered the boy, doing his best to obey. "Mrs. Copp couldn\'t find it, and thought the captain had took it in his pocket to the Mermaid. Coming back here to say so, I see a figure in the churchyard hiding, like, behind a tombstone. I thought it were old Parkes, a-taking the short cut over the graves to his home, and I stood and looked at him. Then, as he rose himself a bit higher, I see him out and out. It were Mr. Hunter, with his own face and his own coat on--that black and white thing."

"His own coat!"

"It were," groaned the lad. "I never were thinking of anybody but Parkes, but when I once saw the coat and the face, I see it were Mr. Hunter."

Joe\'s hearers did not know what to make of this. Miss Thornycroft privately thought she must fall in a fit, too, she felt so sick and ill.

"Was the face--" began one of the maids, and stopped. Remembering Miss Thornycroft\'s presence, she substituted another word for the one she had been about to speak. "Was the face red?"

"No. White. It--"

At this juncture there came a sharp knock at the window, as if the ghost were knocking to come in. The boy howled, the women shrieked; and the ghost knocked again.

"Who\'s there?" called out Sinnett through the shutters.

"It\'s me," answered a voice, which they recognised for that of Sarah Ford. "Is the kitchen a-fire?"

Sinnett went to the entrance-door and called to her to come in. On occasions, when pressed for time, Sarah would give her messages at the kitchen-window, to save going round. She had brought the newspaper, one lent by the Red Court to Captain Copp: Mrs. Copp had found it after Joe\'s departure.

"He have seen a ghost," lucidly explained one of the maids, pointing to Joe.

"Oh," said Sarah, who had a supreme contempt for such things, regarding them as vanities, akin to hysterics and smelling salts.

"I see it in the churchyard, close again his own grave," said the boy, looking helplessly at Sarah.

"See a old cow," responded she, emphatically. "That\'s more likely. They strays in sometimes."

"It were Mr. Hunter\'s ghost," persisted Joe. "He wore that there fur coat, and he stared at me like anything. I see his eyes a-glaring."

"The boy has been dreaming," cried Sarah, pityingly, as she turned to Sinnett. "I should give him a good dose of Epsom salts."

Which prescription Joe by no means approved of. However, Sarah could not stay to see it enforced; and we must go out with her.

Her master had come in when she reached home. It was supper time, and she began to lay the cloth. Old Mrs. Copp was there: she had arrived the previous day (after spending the winter in London) on another long visit. Peering through her tortoiseshell spectacles at Sarah, she told her in her decisive way that she had been twice as long taking home the newspaper as she need have been.

"I know that," answered Sarah, with composure. "A fine commotion I fo............