eads, and deeper furrows would
gather in her forehead, and her face grow ashen and perturbed. And this
was not mended by the levity with which the young ladies, with whom the
spectre had lost his influence, familiarity, as usual, breeding
contempt, had come to talk, and even to jest, about it.

CHAPTER V

The Man with the Claret Mark

But as the former excitement flagged, old Peggy Sullivan produced a new
one; for she solemnly avowed that she had seen a thin-faced man, with an
ugly red mark all over the side of his cheek, looking out of the same
window, just at sunset, before the young ladies returned from their
evening walk.

This sounded in their ears like an old woman's dream, but still it was
an excitement, jocular in the morning, and just, perhaps, a little
fearful as night overspread the vast and desolate building, but still,
not wholly unpleasant. This little flicker of credulity suddenly,
however, blazed up into the full light of conviction.

Old Laurence, who was not given to dreaming, and had a cool, hard head,
and an eye like a hawk, saw the same figure, just about the same hour,
when the last level gleam of sunset was tinting the summits of the
towers and the tops of the tall trees that surrounded them.

He had just entered the court from the great gate, when he heard all at
once the hard peculiar twitter of alarm which sparrows make when a cat
or a hawk invades their safety, rising all round from the thick ivy that
overclimbed the wall on his left, and raising his eyes listlessly, he
saw, with a sort of shock, a thin, ungainly man, standing with his legs
crossed, in the recess of the window from which the light was wont to
issue, leaning with his elbows on the stone mullion, and looking down
with a sort of sickly sneer, his hollow yellow cheeks being deeply
stained on one side with what is called a "claret-mark."

"I have you at last, you villain!" cried Larry, in a strange rage and
panic: "drop down out of that on the grass here, and give yourself up,
or I'll shoot you."

The threat was backed with an oath, and he drew from his coat pocket the
long holster pistol he was wont to carry, and covered his man cleverly.

"I give you while I count ten--one-two-three-four. If you draw back,
I'll fire, mind; five-six--you'd better be lively--seven-eight-nine--one
chance more; will you come down? Then take it--ten!"

Bang went the pistol. The sinister stranger was hardly fifteen feet
removed from h