tion. "What do ye here?" said he, reeling
forward. "Ha! human bones? And whose may they be, think ye?"

"They are Clarke's!" said the woman, who had first given rise to that
supposition.

"Yes, we think they are Daniel Clarke's,--he who disappeared some
years ago!" cried two or three voices in concert. "Clarke's?" repeated
Houseman, stooping down and picking up a thigh-bone, which lay at a
little distance from the rest; "Clarke's? Ha! ha! they are no more
Clarke's than mine!"

"Behold!" shouted Walter, in a voice that rang from cliff to plain; and
springing forward, he seized Houseman with a giant's grasp,--"behold the
murderer!"

As if the avenging voice of Heaven had spoken, a thrilling, an electric
conviction darted through the crowd. Each of the elder spectators
remembered at once the person of Houseman, and the suspicion that had
attached to his name.

"Seize him! seize him!" burst forth from twenty voices. "Houseman is the
murderer!"

"Murderer!" faltered Houseman, trembling in the iron hands of
Walter,--"murderer of whom? I tell ye these are not Clarke's bones!"

"Where then do they lie?" cried his arrester.

Pale, confused, conscience-stricken, the bewilderment of intoxication
mingling with that of fear, Houseman turned a ghastly look around him,
and, shrinking from the eyes of all, reading in the eyes of all his
condemnation, he gasped out, "Search St. Robert's Cave, in the turn at
the entrance!"

"Away!" rang the deep voice of Walter, on the instant; "away! To the
cave, to the cave!"

On the banks of the River Nid, whose waters keep an everlasting murmur
to the crags and trees that overhang them, is a wild and dreary cavern,
hollowed from a rock which, according to tradition, was formerly the
hermitage of one of those early enthusiasts who made their solitude in
the sternest recesses of earth, and from the austerest thoughts and the
bitterest penance wrought their joyless offerings to the great Spirit
of the lovely world. To this desolate spot, called, from the name of
its once celebrated eremite, St. Robert's Cave, the crowd now swept,
increasing its numbers as it advanced.

The old man who had discovered the unknown remains, which were gathered
up and made a part of the procession, led the way; Houseman, placed
between two strong and active men, went next; and Walter followed
behind, fixing his eyes mutely upon the ruffian. The curate had had the
precaution to send on before for torches, for t