"to be some kind of closing up
here, though it may of course turn out of no interest to us! Shall I go
on, and see what it is?"

"By all means," she answered, but turned pale as she spoke.

Donal looked at her anxiously. She understood his look.

"You must not mind my feeling a little silly," she said. "I am not
silly enough to give way to it."

He went on again with his knife, and had presently cleared the outlines
of a stone that filled nearly all the side of the recess. He paused.

"Go on! go on!" said Arctura.

"I must first get a better tool or two," answered Donal. "Will you mind
being left?"

"I can bear it. But do not be long. A few minutes may evaporate my
courage."

Donal hurried away to get a hammer and chisel, and a pail to put the
broken plaster in. Lady Arctura stood and waited. The silence closed in
upon her. She began to feel eerie. She felt as if she had but to will
and see through the wall to what lay beyond it. To keep herself from so
willing, she had all but reduced herself to mental inaction, when she
started to her feet with a smothered cry: a knock not over gentle
sounded on the door of the outer room. She darted to the bedroom-door
and flung it to--next to the press, and with one push had it nearly in
its place. Then she opened again the door, thinking to wait for a
second knock on the other before she answered. But as she opened the
inner, the outer door also opened--slowly--and a face looked in. She
would rather have had a visitor from behind the press! It was her
uncle; his face cadaverous; his eyes dull, but with a kind of glitter
in them; his look like that of a housebreaker. In terror of himself, in
terror lest he should discover what they had been about, in terror lest
Donal should appear, wishing to warn the latter, and certain that,
early as it was, her uncle was not himself, with intuitive impulse, the
moment she saw him, she cried out,

"Uncle! what is that behind you?"

She felt afterwards, and was very sorry, that it was both a deceitful
and cruel thing to do; but she did it, as I have said, by a swift,
unreflecting instinct--which she concluded, in thinking about it, came
from the ready craft of some ancestor, and illustrated what Donal had
been saying.

The earl turned like one struck on the back, imagined something of
which Arctura knew nothing, cowered to two-thirds of his height, and
crept away. Though herself trembling from head to foot, Arctura was
seized with