with
you. The fact is, I have some questions to put, which only the dead can
answer--passages in the family correspondence, referring to things I
can't make out for the life of me."

"Oh, Mr. Raby, pray don't talk in this dreadful way, for fear they
should be angry and come." And Grace looked fearfully round over her
shoulder.

Mr. Raby shook his head; and there was a dead silence.

Mr. Raby broke it rather unexpectedly. "But," said he, gravely, "if I
have seen nothing, I've heard something. Whether it was supernatural,
I can't say; but, at least, it was unaccountable and terrible. I have
heard THE GABRIEL HOUNDS."

Mr. Coventry and Grace looked at one another, and then inquired, almost
in a breath, what the Gabriel hounds were.

"A strange thing in the air that is said, in these parts, to foretell
calamity."

"Oh dear!" said Grace, "this is thrilling again; pray tell us."

"Well, one night I was at Hillsborough on business, and, as I walked
by the old parish church, a great pack of beagles, in full cry, passed
close over my head."

"Oh!"

"Yes; they startled me, as I never was startled in my life before. I had
never heard of the Gabriel hounds then, and I was stupefied. I think
I leaned against the wall there full five minutes, before I recovered
myself, and went on."

"Oh dear! But did any thing come of it?"

"You shall judge for yourself. I had left a certain house about an hour
and a half: there was trouble in that house, but only of a pecuniary
kind. To tell the truth, I came back with some money for them, or
rather, I should say, with the promise of it. I found the wife in a
swoon: and, upstairs, her husband lay dead by his own hand."

"Oh, my poor godpapa!" cried Grace, flinging her arm tenderly round his
neck.

"Ay, my child, and the trouble did not end there. Insult followed;
ingratitude; and a family feud, which is not healed yet, and never will
be--till she and her brat come on their knees to me."

Mr. Raby had no sooner uttered these last words with great heat, than
he was angry with himself. "Ah!" said he, "the older a man gets, the
weaker. To think of my mentioning that to you young people!" And he rose
and walked about the room in considerable agitation and vexation. "Curse
the Gabriel hounds! It is the first time I have spoken of them since
that awful night; it is the last I ever will speak of them. What they
are, God, who made them, knows. Only I pray I may never hear them again,
nor