next, Erema?"

"To go to the very place itself," I said, speaking strongly under
challenge, though quite unresolved about such a thing before; "to live
in the house where my father lived, and my mother and all of the family
died; and from day to day to search every corner and fish up every bit
of evidence, until I get hold of the true man at last, of the villain
who did it--who did it, and left my father and all the rest of us to be
condemned and die for it."

"Erema," replied my cousin, as he had told me now to call him, "you are
too impetuous for such work, and it is wholly unfit for you. For such a
task, persons of trained sagacity and keen observation are needed. And
after all these eighteen years, or nearly nineteen now it must be, there
can not be any thing to discover there."

"But if I like, may I go there, cousin, if only to satisfy my own mind?
I am miserable now at Bruntsea, and Sir Montague Hockin wears me out."

"Sir Montague Hockin!" Lord Castlewood exclaimed; "why, you did not tell
me that he was there. Wherever he is, you should not be."

"I forgot to speak of him. He does not live there, but is continually
to and fro for bathing, or fishing, or rabbit-shooting, or any other
pretext. And he makes the place very unpleasant to me, kind as the Major
and Mrs. Hockin are, because I can never make him out at all."

"Do not try to do so," my cousin answered, looking at me earnestly; "be
content to know nothing of him, my dear. If you can put up with a very
dull house, and a host who is even duller, come here and live with me,
as your father would have wished, and as I, your nearest relative, now
ask and beg of you."

This was wonderfully kind, and for a moment I felt tempted. Lord
Castlewood being an elderly man, and, as the head of our family, my
natural protector, there could be nothing wrong, and there might be much
that was good, in such an easy arrangement. But, on the other hand, it
seemed to me that after this my work would languish. Living in comfort
and prosperity under the roof of my forefathers, beyond any doubt I
should begin to fall into habits of luxury, to take to the love of
literature, which I knew to be latent within me, to lose the clear,
strong, practical sense of the duty for which I, the last of seven, was
spared, and in some measure, perhaps, by wanderings and by hardships,
fitted. And then I thought of my host's weak health, continual pain (the
signs of which were hardly represse