d then, as there came no answer from that shrinking clinging figure,
with a sudden spring forward, that brought him quite close to her, John
Saltram tore the veil away from the hidden face.

"This must be some impostor," he said; "this is not my wife."

He was right. The creature clinging to Percival Nowell's arm was a pretty
woman enough, with rather red hair, and a common face. She was about
Marian's height; and that was the only likeness between them.

The spectators of this brief fracas crowded round the actors in it,
seeing nothing but the insult offered to a lady, and highly indignant
with John Saltram; and amidst their murmurs Percival Nowell pushed his
way to the shore, with the woman still clinging to his arm.

CHAPTER XLII.

THE PLEASURES OF WYNCOMB.

That shrill anguish-stricken cry which Ellen Whitelaw had heard on the
night of the stranger's visit to Wyncomb Farm haunted her afterwards with
a wearisome persistence. She could not forget that wild unearthly sound;
she could not help continually trying to find some solution for the
mystery, until her brain was tired with the perpetual effort.

Ponder upon this matter as she might, she could find no reasonable
explanation of the enigma; and in spite of her common sense--a quality of
which she possessed a very fair share--she was fain to believe at last
that this grim bare-looking old house was haunted, and that the agonised
shriek she and Mrs. Tadman had heard that night was only the ghostly
sound of some cry wrung from a bleeding heart in days gone by, the echo
of an anguish that had been in the far past.

She even went so far as to ask her husband one day if he had ever heard
that the house was haunted, and whether there was any record of crime or
wrong that had been done in it in the past. Mr. Whitelaw seemed scarcely
to relish the question; but after one of his meditative pauses laughed
his wife's inquiry to scorn, and told her that there were no ghosts at
Wyncomb except the ghosts of dead rats that had ravaged the
granaries--and certainly _they_ seemed to rise from their graves in spite
of poison and traps, cats and ferrets--and that, as to anything that had
been done in the house in days gone by, he had never heard tell that his
ancestors had ever done anything but eat and drink and sleep, and save
money from year's end to year's end; and a hard time they'd had of it to
pay their way and put something by, in the face of all the difficulties