Mary Anne Thornycroft had remained at home in a state of mind bordering on distraction. Look where she would, there was no comfort. Surely the death of Robert Hunter had been enough, with all its attendant dreadful circumstances, without this fresh rumour of his "coming again!" Like Mrs. Copp, until impressed with her friend Emma Jenkins\'s experiences, Miss Thornycroft had never put faith in ghosts. She was accustomed to ridicule those who believed in the one said to haunt the plateau; but her scepticism was shaken now.

She had paid little attention to the first reports, for she knew how prone the ignorant are in general, and Coastdown in particular, to spread supernatural tales. But these reports grew and magnified. Robert Hunter was dead and buried: how then reconcile that fact with this mysterious appearance said to haunt the churchyard? Her mind became shaken; and when, on the previous night, her brother Isaac imparted to her the fact that he had seen it with his own sensible, dispassionate eyes, a sickening conviction flashed over her that it was indeed Robert Hunter\'s spirit. And now, to confirm it, came the testimony of the matter-of-fact Sarah. Possibly, but for the sad manner in which her nerves had been shaken, this new view might not have been taken up.

"What does it want?" she asked herself, sitting there alone in the gloomy parlour: and certain words just spoken by Sarah recurred to her, as if in answer. "It may want to denounce its murderer." Stronger even than the grief and regret she felt at his untimely fate, at the abrupt termination of her unhappy love, was the lively dread of discovery, for Richard\'s sake. That must be guarded against, if it were possible; for what might it not bring in its train? The betrayal of the illicit practices the Red Court Farm had lived by; the dishonour of her father and his house; perhaps the trial--condemnation--execution of Richard.

Sick, trembling, half mad with these reflections, pacing the room in agony, was she, when Richard entered. Had he seen the ghost? He looked as if he had. His damp hair hung about in a black mass, and his face and lips were as ghastly as Hunter\'s. His sister gazed at him with surprise: the always self-possessed Richard!

"Have you come from the village?" she asked.

"From that way."

"Did you happen to turn to the churchyard?"

"Yes," was the laconic reply.

"You know what they say: that his spirit appears there."

"I have seen it," was Richard\'s unexpected answer.

Miss Thornycroft started. "Oh, Richard! When?"

"Now. I went to look, and I saw it. There\'s no mistake about its being Hunter, or some fool made up to personate him."

"It has taken away your colour, Richard."

Richard Thornycroft did not reply. He sat with his elbow on his knee, and his chin resting on his hand, looking into the fire. The once brave man, brave to recklessness, had been scared for the first time in his mortal life. The crime lying heavily on his soul had made a coward of him.

He said nothing of the details, but they must be supplied. Shortly after Isaac had quitted Tomlett\'s, Richard also left, intending to go straight home. As he struck across to the direct road--not the one by the plateau--a thought came to him to take a look at the churchyard; and he turned to it.

There was Robert Hunter. As Richard\'s footsteps sounded on the night air, nearing the churchyard, the head and shoulders of the haunting spirit appeared, raising themselves behind old Marley\'s high tombstone. Richard stood still. "There was no mistake," as he observed to his sister, "that it was Hunter." And the eyes of the two were strained, the one on the other. Suddenly the ghost came into full view and advanced, and Richard Thornycroft turned and fled. An arrant coward he at that moment, alone with the ghost and his own awful conscience.

Whether the apparition would have pursued him; whether Richard would have gathered bravery enough to turn and face it, could never be known. The doctor\'s boy, having been to the heath with old Connaught\'s physic, ran past shouting and singing; "the whistling aloud to keep his courage up," as Bloomfield (is it not?) so subtly says, was not enough now for those who had to pass the churchyard at Coastdown. The ghost vanished, and Richard strode on to the Red Court Farm.

But he did not tell of all this. Mary Anne, who had been bending her head on the arm of the sofa, suddenly rose, resolution in her face and in her low, firm tone.

"Richard, if you accompany me for protection, I will go and see this spirit. I will ask what it wants. Let us go."

"You!" he somewhat contemptuously exclaimed.

"I will steel my nerves and heart to it. I have been striving to do so for the last half hour. Better for me to hold communion with it than any one else, save you. You know why, Richard."

"Tush!" he exclaimed. "Do nothing. You\'d faint by the way."

"It is necessary for the honour and safety of--of--this house," she urged, not caring to speak more pointedly, "that no stranger should hear what it wants. I will go now. If I wait until to-morrow my courage may fail. I go, Richard, whether with you or alone. You are not afraid?"

For answer, Richard rose, and they left the room. In passing through the hall, Mary Anne threw on her woollen shawl and garden-bonnet, just as she had thrown them on the night of Hunter\'s murder; and they started.

Not a word was spoken by either until they reached the corner of the churchyard. The high, thickset hedge, facing them as they advanced, prevented their seeing into it, but they would soon come in front, where the shrubs grew low behind the iron railings. Miss Thornycroft stopped.

"You stay here, Richard. I will go on alone."

"No," he began, but she peremptorily interrupted him.

"I will have it so. If I am to go on with this, I will be alone. You can keep me within sight." And Richard acquiesced, despising himself for his cowardice, but unable to overcome it. He could not--no, he could not face the man whose life he had taken.

Mary Anne Thornycroft opened the gate and went in. In his place (he seemed to have specially appropriated to himself) behind old Marley\'s tomb, stood Robert Hunter. How she contrived to advance--contrived to face him and keep her senses, Mary Anne Thornycroft could never afterwards understand.

Is it of any use to go on mystifying you, my reader? Perhaps from the first you have suspected the truth. Any way, it may be better to solve the secret, for time is growing limited, as it was solved that night to Mary Anne and Richard Thornycroft. The ghost, prowling about still, was looking out for Richard, its sole object all along; but it was Robert Hunter himself and not his ghost. For Robert Hunter was not dead.

He had been in London all the while they mourned him so, as much alive as any of his mourners, quite unconscious that he was looked upon as murdered, and that the county coroner had held an inquest on his body. A week since, he had come down from London to Coastdown, had come in secret, not caring to show himself in the neighbourhood, and not daring to show himself openly to the Thornycrofts. He wanted to obtain an interview with Mary Anne; but to want it was a great deal easier than to get it, in consequence of that extravagant and hasty oath imposed upon him by Richard. According to its terms, he must not write to any one of the inmates of the Red Court Farm; he must not enter it; he must not show himself at Coastdown; and he could only hit upon the plan of coming down en cachette, keeping himself close by day, and watching for Richard at night. Not a very brilliant scheme, but he could think of no better; and, singular perhaps to say, there was no bar to his speaking to Richard if he met him; if the spirit of the oath provided against that, the letter did not; and Robert Hunter\'s business was urgent. So he came down to Jutpoint, walked over at night, and took up his quarters in a lonely hut that he knew of behind the churchyard, inhabited by a superannuated fisherman, old Parkes. The aged fisherman, of dim sight and failing memory, did not know his guest; he was easily bribed not to tell of his sojourn; and the rumours of the ghost had not penetrated to him. In that hut Hunter lay by day, and watched from the churchyard by night, as being a likely spot to see Richard, who used often to pass and repass it on his way to and from the heath, and an unlikely one to be seen and recognised by the public. With that convenient tomb of old Marley\'s to shelter behind whenever footsteps approached, he did not fear. Unfortunately, it was necessary that he should look out to see whether the footsteps were not Richard\'s; and this looking out had brought about all the terror. His retreating place, when people had intruded into the churchyard, Isaac for one, was under a shelving gravestone at the back of the church, where none would think of looking. And there he had been on the watch, never dreaming that he was being mistaken for his own ghost, for he knew nothing of his supposed murder.

In little more than half-a-dozen sentences this was revealed to Mary Anne Thornycroft. It was the last night that he could stay: and he had resolved, in the fear of having to go back to London with his errand unexecuted, to accost any one of the Thornycroft family that might approach him, although by so doing the oath was infringed. As their voices were borne on the night air to the ear of Richard, sufficient evidence that Hunter was a living man, a load fell from his heart. In the first blissful throb of the discovery, the thought that surged through him, turning darkness into light, was, "If he is alive, I am no murderer." He ran forward, gained the spot where they stood, grasped Hunter\'s hand and well-nigh embraced him. He, the cold, stern, undemonstrative Richard Thornycroft! he, with all his dislike of Hunter!

Do you consider well what that joy must be--relief from the supposed committed crime of murder? The awful nightmare that has been weighing us down: the sin that has been eating away our heartstrings! Some of us may have faintly experienced this in a vision during sleep.

"I do not understand it, Hunter," whispered Richard, his words taking a sobbing sound as they burst from his heaving breast in the intensity of his emotion. "It is like awaking from some hideous dream. If I shot you down, how is it that you are here?"

"You never shot me down. Old Parkes has been driving at some obscure tale about young Hunter being shot from the heights; but I treated it as a childish old man\'s fancies. Mary Anne, too, is wearing mourning for me, she says, though ostensibly put on for Lady Ellis, and came here to have speech of my ghost. I thought ghosts had gone out with the eighteenth century."

All three felt bewildered; idea after idea crowding on their minds: not one of them as yet clear or tangible. Mary Anne could not so soon overcome the shivering sensation that, had been upon her, and caught hold of her brother\'s arm for support. There was much of explanation to be had yet.

"Let us go and sit down in the church porch," she said; "we shall be quiet there."

They walked round the narrow path towards it. It was on the side of the church facing the Red Court. The brother and sister placed themselves on one bench: Hunter opposite. The moonlight streamed upon them, but they were in no danger there of being observed by any chance passer-by; for the hedge skirting the ground on that side was high and thick.

"That night," began Richard, "after you had gone away, what brought you back again?"

"Back where?" asked Hunter.

"Back on the plateau. Watching the fellows from the boats."

"I was not there. I did not come back."

The assertion sounded like a false one in the teeth of recollection. Mary Anne broke the silence, her low tone rather an impatient one.

"I saw you there, Robert--I and Anna Chester. We were coming up to speak to you, and got as far as the Round Tower--"

"What was worse, I saw you," hoarsely broke in Richard. "After what had passed between us, and your solemn oath to me, I felt shocked at your want of faith. I was maddened by your bad feeling, your obstinate determination to spy upon and betray us; and I stood by that same Round Tower and shot you down."

"I do not know what you are talking of," returned. Robert Hunter. "I tell you I never came back; never for one moment I got to Jutpoint by half-past ten or a quarter to eleven, so you may judge that I stepped out well."

"Did Cyril go there with you?"

"Cyril! Of course not. He left me soon after we passed the village. He only came as far as the wherry. I have been looking for Cyril while dodging about in this churchyard. I\'d rather have seen him than you. He would not have been violent, you know, and would have carried you my message."

"We have never seen Cyril since that night," said Miss Thornycroft.

"Not seen Cyril!" echoed Hunter. "Where is he?"

"But we are not uneasy about him," said Richard, dropping his voice. "At least, I am not. We expect he went off in the boats with the smugglers when they rowed back to the ship that night after the cargo was run. Indeed, we feel positive of it. My father once did the same, to the terror of my mother. I believe she had him advertised. Cyril is taking a tolerably long spell on the French coast; but I think I can account for that. He will come home now."

"Still you have not explained," resumed Hunter. "What gave rise to this report that I was shot down?"

"Report!" cried Richard, vehemently, his new-found satisfaction beginning to fade, as sober recollection returned to him. "Somebody was shot, if you were not. We had the coroner\'s inquest on him, and he lies buried in this churchyard as Robert Hunter."

"But the features could not have been mine," debated Hunter.

"The face was not recognisable; but the head and hair were yours, and the dress was yours--a black dinner suit; and---- By the way," broke off Richard, "what is this mystery? This coat, which you appear now to have on, is at this moment in the stables at the Mermaid, and has been ever since the inquest."

Does the reader notice that one word of Richard Thornycroft\'s--"Appear?" Appear to have on! Was he still doubting whether the man before him could be real?

"Oh, this is Dr. Macpherson\'s," said Hunter, with a brief laugh. "They were fellow coats, you know, Mary Anne. You did not send me my own--at least, I never received it; and one cold day, when I happened to be there, the professor surreptitiously handed me his out of a lumber closet, glad to get rid of it, hoping madame would think it was stolen. She could not forget the grievance of his having bought them. Why did not mine come with the portmanteau?"

More amazement, more puzzle, and Richard further at sea than ever.

"When you left that night, you had your coat with you, Hunter. I saw you put it on."

"But I found it an encumbrance. I had taken more wine than usual. I had had other things to make me hot, and I did not relish the prospect of carrying it, whether on or off, for five or six miles. So I took it off when we got to the wherry, and begged Cyril to carry it back with him, and send it with the portmanteau the following morning."

A pause of thought; it seemed they were trying to realize the sense of the words. Suddenly Mary Anne started, gasped, and laid her face down on her brother\'s shoulder, with a sharp, low moan of pain. He leaned forward and, stared at Hunter, a pitiable expression of dread on his countenance, as the moonlight fell on his ghastly face and strained-back lips............