Mr. Chandos advanced with suavity; the officers saluted him and took off their hats. He held his handkerchief to his face, as if fearing the draught: I knew that it was to shade his livid countenance.

"A late visit, gentlemen! To what am I indebted for it?"

He had been gradually withdrawing to the oak-parlour as he spoke, and they came with him. I drew back in confused indecision, and stood humbly in the remotest and darkest corner. I had not courage to quit the room, for I must have brushed by them: I hoped that Mr. Chandos would see and dismiss me. But no; he never looked my way. He closed the door, in the face of Hickens, whose state of mind was a pretty even balance between wonder and dismay.

"We could not get here sooner, sir," observed one of the officers, who spoke quite like a gentleman, "but we hope the delay has not been inconvenient to you. The inspector, to whom your note was addressed, was out when it arrived, so that it was not opened immediately."

Had the sentence been spoken in an unknown tongue, it could not more completely have puzzled Mr. Chandos, to judge by his looks.

"What note do you speak of?"

"The note you sent in to-day."

This appeared to be no elucidation to Mr. Chandos.

"Will you tell me what its contents were?"

"We got but one, sir. It requested two or three of us to be here to-night, mounted. It intimated that the thief, who has been playing tricks in your house, was discovered, and would be given up to us. Our inspector wondered why we were wanted to come mounted."

Oh, the change that fell over the face of Mr. Chandos! the eager light of hope, the vivid rush of renewed colour! It was as one awakening from death to life.

"Gentlemen," he said with a smile, as he pointed to seats, "I fear a trick has been played upon you. I have not written to your inspector, and most certainly possess as yet, no clue to the parties who have been so disagreeably busy at Chandos."

They seemed hardly to believe him. For my own part I could scarcely tell what was real, what not.

"But you must not go back without refreshment, although you have had a useless ride," concluded Mr. Chandos, when some further explanation had passed. "It shall be brought in at once," he added, ringing for Hickens. "And this young lady," looking at me then, "will obligingly see the housekeeper and bid her hasten it."

I obeyed the look and followed him into the hall. Hickens was there.

"Supper, Hickens. These gentlemen will take some before their departure. Bring the best of what you have, and be quick over it."

Hickens moved away with alacrity: the word "departure" had reassured him, and also seemed to afford hope that his curiosity would be satisfied. Mr. Chandos caught my hand and drew me through the door to the foot of the stairs. His own hand was trembling, and cold as ice: unconsciously, I think, to himself, he laid it on my shoulder, and spoke in the gentlest whisper.

"Go to the west wing, Anne. Knock at the outer door, but do not attempt to enter. Hill will answer you. Tell her to inform Lady Chandos that it is a false alarm; that the officers have only come respecting what was recently lost from my desk, and that I have ordered supper for them. Say that I will be with my mother as soon as possible, but I remain at present to entertain them."

He returned swiftly to the parlour, closing the door, leaving me to proceed on my errand. Hill answered my knock, her face and her cap of an equal whiteness, and I delivered the message, speaking in a whisper. Strangely relieved seemed she, at least in an equal degree with Mr. Chandos, and she made me repeat the little I had heard said by the officers, as if scarcely daring to believe the good tidings, without confirmation.

"Heaven be praised!" she exclaimed; "it would just have killed my lady. Bless you, child, for a good girl."

That Hill\'s relief of mind must have been something extraordinary for her to bless me, one could but acknowledge; and I excused her shutting the baize door in my face.

In less than half an hour, I heard the police ride away, as I sat in my chamber, and Mr. Chandos passed to the west wing. It was very dull for me in that lonely bedroom, and only half-past nine o\'clock; so I thought I might go down again. Hickens was putting the things together on the supper tray.

"Miss, do you know what those men came for?" he asked.

"Well, Hickens, not exactly. Nothing at all to be afraid of, so far as I could gather. I heard Mr. Chandos laughing with them when they went away."

"Oh, I heard that; I was rung for to show \'em out," returned Hickens. "My opinion is this, Miss, that it\'s just a scandal for policemen to ride up at will in the dark night to a gentleman\'s seat--almost a nobleman\'s--and if I were Mr. Chandos I\'d let them know it. Swords clanging to \'em, indeed! What next?"

He went away with his tray. Five minutes afterwards Mr. Chandos came down. He was so gay; his step was light, his face smiling. It was only the reaction that sometimes sets in after deliverance from great fear. I had not thought to see him again that night: and stupidly said so.

"No! I came to look after you; lest you should have melted away with terror. Were you very much scared, Anne?"

"Yes; just at first."

"Take it for all in all this has been a sensational evening," he resumed, laughing. "My accident at the window; your discovery of the marked money in your box; and the visitation of the police. Private families cannot in general boast of so much entertainment all at once."

I looked at him wistfully. After the intense agitation and dread he had betrayed, this light tone sounded very unnatural; almost like a mocking make-believe.

"Mr. Chandos, I fear you live in some great peril," was my timid rejoinder. "I suppose I may not be told what it is; but I wish I could ease you; I wish I could avert it from you, whatever it may be."

As if by magic, his mood changed, and the dark shade came back to his countenance. "So you won\'t let me cheat myself, Anne! I was trying if I could do it."

"If you would but tell me what it is! If I could avert it from you!"

"No living being can do that, child. I wish I could forget it, if only for a moment."

"And you cannot?"

"Never; by night or by day. I appear as the rest of the world does; I laugh, I talk; but within lies ever that one terrible care, weighing me down like an incubus."

How terrible it was, I could see even then, as he covered his eyes for a moment with his wasted hand.

"But to-night has brought me a great relief--though it may be but temporary," he resumed, looking up. "How thankful I felt when the police explained their errand, God alone can ever know."

"But what errand did you fear they had come upon?"

"That I cannot tell you. Not upon quite so harmless a one as it turned out to be."

"Better, perhaps, that they had come for me."

Mr. Chandos smiled--as well he might at the words; and passed to a gayer strain.

"Which of the three would you have preferred to ride before, had I given you into custody for finding that money of mine in your possession? We must have looked for a pillion!"

But I did not answer in the same jesting spirit; I could not so readily forget my alarm, or their hidden trouble. Very gravely, for it was nearly bedtime, I put my hand out to wish him good-night. He took it within both of his, and there was a pause of silence.

"Anne," he said, his low voice sounding strangely solemn in the stillness of the room, "you have been to-night forced into what may be called a species of confidence as to our unhappy secrets; at least, to have become cognizant that Chandos has things to be concealed. Will you be true to us--in so far as not to speak of this?"

"I will."

"In the house and out of it?"--and he seemed to lay emphasis on the "in."

"I will be true as heaven," I answered in my earnestness. "I will seem to forget that I know it myself."

"Thank you, my best friend. Good-night."

I had come up earlier than usual; it was not ten o\'clock; and I thought I might read for half an hour without transgressing any good rule. But where had I left my book? Looking about, I could not see it.

It occurred to me then. I had been sitting reading in the gallery window for some minutes before dinner; and must have left the book there. It was but a few steps, and I went to fetch it.

There it was. I found it by feel, not by sight. The moon was bright again, but the window-shutters were closed and barred. It was that beautiful story, the "Heir of Redclyffe." Madame de Mellissie had bought the Tauchnitz edition of it in Paris, and had left it behind her at Chandos. Soon after she departed, I had found it and read it; and was now dipping into it again.

But now--as I took it in my hand, there occurred a very strange thing, frightening me nearly to death. Turning from the window, the whole length of gallery was before me up to the door of the west wing, the moonlight shining into it in places from the high windows above. There, midway in the passage, the moonlight revealing it, was a shadowy sort of form; looking like nothing on earth but an apparition.

I was in the shade; in the dark; remember that. Gliding along slowly, one of its arms stretched out, looking just as if it were stretched out in warning to me to escape--and I had not the sense then to remember that I must be invisible--on it came. A tall, thin skeleton of a form, with a white and shadowy face. There was no escape for me: to fly to my own room would be to meet it; and no other door of refuge was open.

It has never been your fate as I feel sure, my gentle reader, to be at one end of a gallery in a haunted house at night and see a ghost gliding towards you from the other; so please don\'t laugh at me. What my sensations were I can neither describe nor you conceive: I cannot bear to think of them even now. That I beheld the ghost, said to haunt Chandos, my sick heart as fully believed, in that moment, as it believed in Heaven. Presence of mind forsook me; all that the wildest imagination can picture of superstitious terror assailed me: and I almost think--yes, I do think--that I might have lost my senses or died, but for the arrival of succour.

Oh, believe me! In these awful moments, which have on occasion come to people in real life far more certainly and terribly than anything ever represented in fiction, believe me, God is ever at hand to send relief. The overstrung mind is not abandoned to itself: very, very rarely indeed are our guardian angels absent, or unready to work by an earthly instrument.

It came to me in the person of Mr. Chandos. Ascending the stairs, a candle in his hand, softly whistling in unconcern, he came. It was no moment for deliberation: had it been a king or emperor, it had been all the same to me. With a great cry of anguish; with a low prolonged shriek, that burst from me in the tension of nerves and brain; with a clasp of his arm, as if I dare not let him go again, I laid hold of him; dropping the book on the carpet of the gallery.

I suppose he put the wax-light down; I suppose he got over his astonishment in some way: all I knew was that in a moment he was holding me in his arms, trying to soothe my sobbing. Reaction had come, and with it tears; never before had I cried so violently; and I clung to him still in an agony of terror, as one, drowning, clings to the living. But nothing remained in the gallery. Whatever had been in it had vanished.

"What is all this? What has alarmed you?"

"It was there; it was coming towards me!" I whispered hysterically in answer. "Oh forgive me! Hold me! I feel as though I should die."

"What was coming?" he inquired.

"The same--I think--that is seen in the grounds. The ghost. I saw it."

"How can you be so foolish? how can you take up these absurd fancies?" he remonstrated, in a sharp tone, moving some steps away from me.

"I did, Mr. Chandos; I did. It came along with its arm raised, as if to warn me off: a tall skeleton of a form, with shadowy features the hue of the dead. Features that bear, in their formation, a great resemblance to yours."

Was it fancy? or was it fact?--that his own features, as I spoke, assumed an ashy tint, just as they had done when the police-officers came?

"What were you doing out here?" he asked, in the same sharp accent.

"I only came to the window-seat to get a book. I saw it as I turned to go back."

"You saw nothing," he persisted, with some warmth. "I am astonished at you, Miss Hereford: the fancy was the creation of your own brain, and nothing more. Pray, if the ghost was here then, where is it now?"

"I don\'t know. It disappeared: I think it seemed to go back towards the west wing. It was certainly there."

"You are certainly silly," was his response. "A vast deal more so than I had given you credit for."

"Ah, Mr. Chandos, you cannot reason me out of my eyesight and my senses. Thank you, thank you ever for coming up the stairs just then: I do believe I should have died, or lost my reason."

Picking up the "Heir of Redclyffe," I walked to my room, went in, and shut the door. Mr. Chandos pulled it open again with a sharp pull.

"Forgive me if I have been harsh. Good-night."

"Oh, yes, sir; I know how foolish it must seem to you. Good-night."

"Go to rest in peace and safety, Anne. And be assured that no ill, ghostly or human, shall work you harm while I am at hand to prevent it."

I closed the door and bolted it, a vague idea in my mind that a bolted door is a better safeguard against a ghost than on unbolted one. Mr. Chandos\'s footsteps died away in the direction of the west wing.

With the morning, a little of the night\'s impression had vanished, for the sun was shining brilliantly. Ghosts and sunlight don\'t accord with each other; you cannot make them amalgamate. Ghosts at midnight are ghosts: in the warm and cheery morning sun they are of doubtful identity; or, at any rate, have vanished very far-off, into unknown regions. I dressed myself as usual, in better spirits than might be supposed, and went down. Mr. Chandos was earlier than I, and stood at the window in the oak-parlour. He took my hand and retained it for some moments in silence, I standing side by side with him, and looking from the window as he did.

"And how is the ghost this morning, Anne?"

"I wish you would regard me as a rational being, Mr. Chandos! Do anything but treat me as a child."

"Nay, I think you proved yourself both irrational and a child last night," he laughingly said.

"Indeed I did not. I wish you had seen what I did."

"I wish I had," was the mocking answer. "Anne, trust me: there is no ghost inside Chandos, whatever they may say as to there being one out of it."

"I don\'t know how I shall be able to go upstairs alone at night again."

"Nor I. You will want Hill and half a dozen lighted torches to escort you. Do you remember my remarking, that last evening, taking one event with another, was a sensational one? But I did not suppose it was to wind up with anything so grand as a ghost."

The mocking tone, the ridicule vexed me. It was as if he ridiculed me. In spite of my good sense and my good manners, the vexation appeared in my eyes.

"There! We will declare a truce, Anne, and let the ghost drop. I don\'t want to make you angry with me."

"I am not angry, sir. I can never repay all your kindness to me; and especially that last one of coming to my relief last night."

"Which was accidental. Shall I tell you how you can repay it all, Anne?"

His voice dropped to earnest seriousness; his eyes, a strangely-sad gravity seated in their depths, looked yearningly into mine.

"I wish you could, sir."

"Let this matter of your ghost be a perfect secret between you and me. One to be disclosed to no one."

"Certainly. I promise."

That some great reason prompted the request was unmistakeable: that there were certain interests attaching to this "ghost," whether it might walk out of doors or in, could but be apparent. A mysterious awe--pardon the words--pervaded the subject altogether; and had from the moment I first entered Chandos. How I wished he would take me into his confidence!--if it were only that I might show him that I would be true and faithful. But for the strange reticence imposed by love when once it takes possession of the soul, I might have boldly suggested this.

He leaned out of the window, inhaling the crisp air of the bright October morning. Courage at length came to me to say a word.

"Of course, sir, I do not fail to see that there are interests here that involve caution and care, though I cannot think how, or what they are. If you would entrust me with them--and I could help in any way--I should be glad. I would be so true."

"Ay, I am sure you would be. Latterly a vision has crossed me of a time--a possible future when it might be disclosed. But it is neither probable nor near. Indeed, it seems like a dream even to glance at it."

He had been looking at the far-off skies as he spoke, as though he were in a dream. The urn was brought in, and I went to the table to make the tea. Newspapers and letters arrived; he was buried in them during breakfast, and carried them afterwards to his own sitting-room.

"I saw his horse brought to the door in the............