cided otherwise; and, therefore, I am content to leave."

"Do not grieve at it, Henry. There has hung a cloud of misfortune over
us all since the garden of this house became the scene of an event which
we can none of us remember but with terror and shuddering."

"Two generations of our family must live and die before the remembrance
of that circumstance can be obliterated. But we will think of it no
more."

There can no doubt but that the dreadful circumstance to which both Mrs.
Bannerworth and Henry alluded, was the suicide of the father of the
family in the gardens which before has been hinted at in the course of
this narration, as being a circumstance which had created a great
sensation at the time, and cast a great gloom for many months over the
family.

The reader will, doubtless, too, recollect that, at his last moments,
this unhappy individual was said to have uttered some incoherent words
about some hidden money, and that the rapid hand of death alone seemed
to prevent him from being explicit upon that subject, and left it merely
a matter of conjecture.

As years had rolled on, this affair, even as a subject of speculation,
had ceased to occupy the minds of any of the Bannerworth family, and
several of their friends, among whom was Mr. Marchdale, were decidedly
of opinion that the apparently pointed and mysterious words uttered,
were but the disordered wanderings of an intellect already hovering on
the confines of eternity.

Indeed, far from any money, of any amount, being a disturbance to the
last moments of the dissolute man, whose vices and extravagances had
brought his family, to such ruin, it was pretty generally believed that
he had committed suicide simply from a conviction of the impossibility
of raising any more supplies of cash, to enable him to carry on the
career which he had pursued for so long.

But to resume.

Henry at once communicated to the admiral what his mother had said, and
then the whole question regarding the removal being settled in the
affirmative, nothing remained to be done but to set about it as quickly
as possible.

The Bannerworths lived sufficiently distant from the town to be out of
earshot of the disturbances which were then taking place; and so
completely isolated were they from all sort of society, that they had no
notion of the popular disturbance which Varney the vampyre had given
rise to.

It was not until the following morning that Mr. Chillingworth, who had