Lady Pell sat looking at her kinsman for a little while in silence, waiting for him to resume his narrative, and it was not till she perceived that he had become oblivious of her presence and was on the point of lapsing into one of his brown studies, that she spoke.

"And what happened after that, cousin?" she asked, "that is to say, after you discovered that you had been brought indoors by the Grey Monk?"

Sir Gilbert, who came to himself with a little start when she began to speak, said: "I have no distinct consciousness of anything that followed till I found Trant standing over me, looking half scared out of his wits, and can only suppose that I must have fainted again. But that, although only for a space of two or three seconds, my eyes beheld a robed and cowled figure, I am as positive as that they behold you at this moment. That it was no hallucination, no piece of visual cheatery, I am firmly convinced."

Some people, in Lady Pell\'s place, might have said to Sir Gilbert: "Yet, when others professed to have seen the Grey Monk, you treated their assertions with contempt, and would have it that they were the victims of a self-created illusion." But Lady Pell was too wise to venture any such observation. What she said was: "If you have told me this, cousin, with any idea that I might perhaps be able to furnish you with even a hint of some clue to the mystery, I must at once confess that your expectation has been wholly in vain. You yourself cannot possibly be more puzzled than I am."

"I hardly expected to hear you say otherwise," he remarked with a half sigh; and with that he again subsided into silence.

Lady Pell resumed her knitting, only to let her hands fall idle again at the end of a couple of minutes, while wholly unaware that she had done so.

Nothing was heard save the monotonous ticking of the clock on the chimney-piece and the hissing and sputtering of the half-burnt logs on the hearth.

"Louisa," spoke the Baronet suddenly in a voice which brought her ladyship back with a start from the land of visions in which she had been mentally wandering--"Louisa, for the last hour or more a very singular idea has intruded itself persistently upon me; it is one which I have striven in vain to get rid of; indeed, so strongly does it hold me that it has almost assumed the proportions of an absolute conviction. It is--that if the cowl of the Grey Monk, who for weeks past has, so to speak, haunted the Chase, could be plucked back, there would stand revealed the features of none other than my eldest-born--my son so long believed to be dead--my hardly dealt-by Alec!"

"Goodness gracious! Cousin Gilbert, whatever made you get that notion into your head?" Lady Pell was staring at him as if she already detected symptoms of brain disease.

"It came into my mind, Louisa; I didn\'t put it there, and it refuses to be dislodged. But what if Alec be not really dead? What if the report that he was killed by that explosion was based on some error to which we have not the key? You remember the letter, written in an evidently disguised hand, which was found on my study table together with the key of the strong room?" Lady Pell nodded assent. "Who but Alec would have been in the position to point out the fact that the child--his child--who had died in infancy, was not a boy, but a girl? Who but Alec--my Alec--would have cared to press a kiss on an old man\'s brow?"

"There is certainly some feasibility in what you say," remarked her ladyship; "but if Alec were still alive he would surely have made the fact known to you long before now."

"You forget that he was a banished man--that it was a condition of the agreement between us that he should never set foot in England till he had my permission to do so. Heaven knows, permission would have been given long ago, because long ago all his early faults and follies were condoned and forgiven, had the faintest suspicion that he was still among the living ever found lodgment in my mind!"

"Even granting your assumption that Alec is still alive (and with all my heart I pray he may be), by what possible motive could he be influe............