ceedings I am well convinced."

When he made such a determination as this, Dr. Chillingworth was not at
all a likely man to break it, so there, looking like a modern statue in
the arbour, he sat with his eyes fixed upon the balcony and the window
of what used to be called Flora's room for some hours.

The doctor was a contemplative man, and therefore he did not so acutely
feel the loneliness of his position as many persons would have done;
moreover, he was decidedly not of a superstitious turn of mind, although
certainly we cannot deny an imagination to him. However, if he really
had harboured some strange fears and terrors they would have been
excusable, when we consider how many circumstances had combined to make
it almost a matter of demonstration that Sir Francis Varney was
something more than mortal.

What quantities of subjects the doctor thought over during his vigil in
that garden it is hard to say, but never in his whole life, probably,
had he such a glorious opportunity for the most undisturbed
contemplation of subjects requiring deep thought to analyze, than as he
had then. At least he felt that since his marriage he had never been so
thoroughly quiet, and left so completely to himself.

It is to be hoped that he succeeded in settling any medical points of a
knotty character that might be hovering in his brain, and certain it is
that he had become quite absorbed in an abstruse matter connected with
physiology, when his ears were startled, and he was at once aroused to a
full consciousness of where he was, and why he had come there, by the
distant sound of a man's footstep.

It was a footstep which seemed to be that of a person who scarcely
thought it at all necessary to use any caution, and the doctor's heart
leaped within him as in the lowest possible whisper he said to
himself,--

"I am successful--I am successful. It is believed now that the Hall is
deserted, and no doubt that is Sir Francis Varney come with confidence,
to carry out his object in so sedulously attacking it, be that object
what it may."

Elated with this idea, the doctor listened intently to the advancing
footstep, which each moment sounded more clearly upon his ears.

It was evidently approaching from the garden entrance towards the house,
and he thought, by the occasional deadened sound of the person's feet,
be he whom he might, that he could not see his way very well, and,
consequently, frequently strayed from the path, on to so