and of all that those sealed lips might tell, and old tales of
strange meetings on moors and desolate places with departed spirits,
flitted across his brain; and the melancholy rush of the night air swept
close about his ears, and he turned and walked more briskly toward his
own gloomy quarters, passing the churchyard of Ballyfermot on his right.
There were plenty of head-stones among the docks and nettles: some short
and some tall, some straight and some slanting back, and some with a
shoulder up, and a lonely old ash-tree still and dewy in the midst,
glimmering cold among the moveless shadows; and then at last he sighted
the heavy masses of old elm, and the pale, peeping front of the 'Tyled
House,' through the close and dismal avenue of elm, he reached the front
of the mansion. There was no glimmer of light from the lower windows,
not even the noiseless flitting of a bat over the dark little
court-yard. His key let him in. He knew that his servants were in bed.
There was something cynical in his ree-raw independence. It was unlike
what he had been used to, and its savagery suited with his bitter and
unsociable mood of late.

But his step sounding through the hall, and the stories about the place
of which he was conscious. He battled with his disturbed foolish
sensations, however, and though he knew there was a candle burning in
his bed-room, he turned aside at the foot of the great stair, and
stumbled and groped his way into the old wainscoted back-parlour, that
looked out, through its great bow window, upon the haunted orchard, and
sat down in its dismal solitude.

He ruminated upon his own hard fate--the meanness of man-kind--the
burning wrongs, as he felt confident, of other times, Fortune's
inexorable persecution of his family, and the stygian gulf that deepened
between him and the object of his love; and his soul darkened with a
fierce despair, and with unshaped but evil thoughts that invited the
tempter.

The darkness and associations of the place were unwholesome, and he was
about to leave it for the companionship of his candle, but that, on a
sudden, he thought he heard a sound nearer than the breeze among the old
orchard trees.

This was the measured breathing of some one in the room. He held his own
breath while he listened--'One of the dogs,' he thought, and he called
them quietly; but no dog came. 'The wind, then, in the chimney;' and he
got up resolutely, designing to open the half-closed shutter. He