is always by the imagination measured
by the number of events which are crowded into a given space of it, and
not by its actual duration. Come into the house; there you will find all
just as you left it, Henry, and you can tell us your story at leisure."

"The air," said Henry, "about here is fresh and pleasant. Let us sit
down in the summer-house yonder, and there I will tell you all. It has a
local interest, too, connected with the tale."

This was agreed to, and, in a few moments, the admiral, Mr.
Chillingworth, and Henry were seated in the same summer-house which had
witnessed the strange interview between Sir Francis Varney and Flora
Bannerworth, in which he had induced her to believe that he felt for the
distress he had occasioned her, and was strongly impressed with the
injustice of her sufferings.

Henry was silent for some few moments, and then he said, with a deep
sigh, as he looked mournfully around him,--

[Illustration]

"It was on this spot that my father breathed his last, and hence have I
said that it has a local interest in the tale I have to tell, which
makes it the most fitting place in which to tell it."

"Oh," said the admiral, "he died here, did he?"

"Yes, where you are now sitting."

"Very good, I have seen many a brave man die in my time, and I hope to
see a few more, although, I grant you, the death in the heat of
conflict, and fighting for our country, is a vastly different thing to
some shore-going mode of leaving the world."

"Yes," said Henry, as if pursuing his own meditations, rather than
listening to the admiral. "Yes, it was from this precise spot that my
father took his last look at the ancient house of his race. What we can
now see of it, he saw of it with his dying eyes and many a time I have
sat here and fancied the world of terrible thoughts that must at such a
moment have come across his brain."

"You might well do so," said the doctor.

"You see," added Henry, "that from here the fullest view you have of any
of the windows of the house is of that of Flora's room, as we have
always called it, because for years she had had it as her chamber; and,
when all the vegetation of summer is in its prime, and the vine which
you perceive crawls over this summer-house is full of leaf and fruit,
the view is so much hindered that it is difficult, without making an
artificial gap in the clustering foliage, to see anything but the
window."

"So I should imagine," replied Mr. Chilli