'Yes,' said Paula.

'How do you know?'

'I've been there.... We are going to be married, aunt.'

'Indeed!' replied Mrs. Goodman. 'Well, I thought this might be the end
of it: you were determined on the point; and I am not much surprised at
your news. Your father was very wise after all in entailing everything
so strictly upon your offspring; for if he had not I should have been
driven wild with the responsibility!'

'And now that the murder is out,' continued Paula, passing over that
view of the case, 'I don't mind telling you that somehow or other I have
got to like George Somerset as desperately as a woman can care for any
man. I thought I should have died when I saw him dancing, and feared
I had lost him! He seemed ten times nicer than ever then! So silly we
women are, that I wouldn't marry a duke in preference to him. There,
that's my honest feeling, and you must make what you can of it; my
conscience is clear, thank Heaven!'

'Have you fixed the day?'

'No,' continued the young lady, still watching the sleeping flies on the
ceiling. 'It is left unsettled between us, while I come and ask you if
there would be any harm--if it could conveniently be before we return to
England?'

'Paula, this is too precipitate!'

'On the contrary, aunt. In matrimony, as in some other things, you
should be slow to decide, but quick to execute. Nothing on earth would
make me marry another man; I know every fibre of his character; and
he knows a good many fibres of mine; so as there is nothing more to be
learnt, why shouldn't we marry at once? On one point I am firm: I will
never return to that castle as Miss Power. A nameless dread comes over
me when I think of it--a fear that some uncanny influence of the dead
De Stancys would drive me again from him. O, if it were to do that,'
she murmured, burying her face in her hands, 'I really think it would be
more than I could bear!'

'Very well,' said Mrs. Goodman; 'we will see what can be done. I will
write to Mr. Wardlaw.'

IV.

On a windy afternoon in November, when more than two months had closed
over the incidents previously recorded, a number of farmers were sitting
in a room of the Lord-Quantock-Arms Inn, Markton, that was used for the
weekly ordinary. It was a long, low apartment, formed by the union of
two or three smaller rooms, with a bow-window looking upon the street,
and at the present moment was pervaded by a blue fog from tobacco-pipes,
and a temperature l