peremptorily refusing to allow Robert to lend so much as a
finger to the performance. They took him up the library stairs, through
the empty book-rooms and that dreary room which had been his father's,
and so into his own. By the time they set him down he was quite aware
and conscious again.

'It can't be said that I follow my own precepts,' he said to Robert
grimly as they put him down. 'Not much of the open eye about this.
I shall sleep myself into the unknown as sweetly as any Saint in the
calendar.'

Robert was going when the Squire called him back.

'You'll stay to-morrow, Elsmere?'

'Of course, if you wish it.'

The wrinkled eyes fixed him intently.

'Why did you ever go?'

'As I told you before, Squire, because there was nothing else for an
honest man to do.'

The Squire turned round with a frown.

'What the deuce are you dawdling about, Benson? Give me my stick and get
me out of this.'

By midnight all was still in the vast pile of Murewell. Outside, the
night was slightly frosty. A clear moon shone over the sloping reaches
of the park; the trees shone silvery in the cold light, their black
shadows cast along the grass. Robert found himself quartered in the
Stuart room, where James II had slept, and where the tartan hangings of
the ponderous carved bed, and the rose and thistle reliefs of the walls
and ceilings, untouched for two hundred years, bore witness to the loyal
preparations made by some bygone Wendover. He was mortally tired, but by
way of distracting his thoughts a little from the Squire, and that other
tragedy which the great house sheltered somewhere in its walls, he took
from his coat-pocket a French _Anthologie_ which had been Catherine's
birthday gift to him, and read a little before he fell asleep.

Then he slept profoundly--the sleep of exhaustion. Suddenly he found
himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to suffocation, strange
noises in his ears.

A cry 'Help!' resounded through the wide empty galleries.

He flung on his dressing-gown, and ran out in the direction of the
Squire's room.

The hideous cries and scuffling grew more apparent as he reached it. At
that moment Benson, the man who had helped to carry the Squire, ran up.

'My God, sir!' he said, deadly white, 'another attack!'

The Squire's room was empty, but the door into the lumber-room adjoining
it was open, and the stifled sounds came through it.

They rushed in and found Meyrick struggling in the grip o