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WANLOCK of Manor looked with a puckered face at the tiny jewel flaming in the hollow of his hand, and, for the hour forswearing piety, cursed the lamented Lady Grace, his sister, haut en bas, with all the fury of his bitter disappointment. The harridan had her revenge! last night he dreamt her envoys by their wailings made the forest hideous; already amongst the Shadows of the monstrous other world, she must be chuckling (if the Shades have laughter) through her toothless gums at the chagrin of her brother, for the first of the seven shocks of evil fortune had that moment staggered him, and he was smitten to the vitals in his purse and pride.

The brooch, so wretchedly inadeqate as consolation for the legacy he had long anticipated, had seemed last night as he peered at it with dubious eyes a bauble wholly innocent, and he had laughed at its sinister reputation, which in a last vagary of her spiteful humour she had been at pains to apprise him of in a posthumous private letter. "Seven shocks of dire disaster, and the last the worst," he had read in the crabbed writing of the woman who, even in prosperity, could never pardon him his luckless speculation with the money that was meant to be her dowry; he

had sneered at her pagan folly, but now the premonstration bore a different aspect; he was stunned with the news that his law-plea with Paul Mellish of The Peel was lost, and that the bare expenses of that longprotracted fight should cost him all that was left of his beggared fortunes. But that was not the worst of it, for Mellish, as in pity of a helpless foe, had waived his admitted claim to the swampy field which was the object of their litigation.

The first blow, surely, with a vengeance!

For a moment Wanlock, now assured of some uncanny essence in the jewel, thought to defend himself by its immediate destruction, and then he had a craftier inspiration. He strode across the room, threw up the window-sash, and bellowed upon Stephen, his idle son, the spoiled monopolist of what love he had to spare.

"You see this brooch?" he said when the lad, with a grey dog at his heels, came in with a rakish swagger from his interrupted dalliance with the last maid (so to call her) left of Wanlock's retinue.

They looked at it together as it lay in the father's hand

a garnet, cut en cabochon, smoothly rounded like a blob of claret by the lapidary, clasped by thin gold claws, and the dog, with eyes askance, stood near them, wrapt in cogi

tations of a different world. Their heads went down upon the gem: they stared in silence, strangely influenced by its eyelike shape and sullen glow, that seemed to come less from the polished surface than from a cynic spirit inward, animate. It had the look of age: had glowed on the breasts of highscarfed dandies, pinned the screens on girlish bosoms flat now in the dust, known the dear privacies of love and passion, lurked in the dusk of treasuries, kept itself unspotted, indifferent, unchanged through the flux of human generations. Lord! that men's lives should be so short and the objects of their fashioning so permanent!

"It may be braw, but it's no' very bonny," at the last quo' Stephen Wanlock.

"I want ye," said his father, "to take it now with—with my assurance of regard and and gratitude to Mellish of The Peel. He has a craze for such gewgaws, with no small part of his money, they tell me, sunk in their collection. You can say it has the reputation of a charm."

Young Wanlock posted off on this pleasant mission, with a chuck below the chin for the maid in passing, and his father, walking in the afternoon between the dishevelled shrubberies of his neglected policies, felt at times among the anguish of his situation a soothing sense of other ills averted and transferred to one whom now he hated worse than ever.

evil genius dwelling in the jewel wrought its purpose with appalling expedition. Something is in the air of our haunted North whose beaked sea promontories cleave the wind and foam, that carries the hint of things impending to all who have boding fears or hateful speculations, and Wanlock knew some blow had fallen on his enemy while yet were no human tidings. The pyots chattered garrulous as women on the walls: the rooks that flew across the grey stormbitten country were in clanging bands, possessed of rumours which they shared at first with the careering clouds alone, for men are the last of all created things to learn of their own disasters.

He went eagerly out and came on other harbingers. A horseman galloped down the glen-"The Peel! The Peel!" he cried, as he thundered past with his head across his shoulder "They have broken The Peel!" A running gipsy with a mountain of shining cans a-clatter on his back skulked into the wood as as Wanlock came upon him, and harried forth by the dog, stood on the highway wildly protesting innocence.

"Who blamed ye?" queried Wanlock. "What has happened?"

"I declare to my God I know nothing of it!" cried the man in an excess of apprehension, "but The Peel, they say, was broken into through the night."

"Ha! say ye

It seemed next day as if the Wanlock,

so!" said kindling. "The

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Wanlock leaned upon his cane, with the grey dog at his heels, and let the exultation of the tidings well through all his being. The woods were sombre round about him: silent and sad, bereft of voices, for it was the summer's end, and birds were grieving their departed children. And yet not wholly still, the forest, for in its dark recesses something unexpressive moved and muttered. His joy ebbed out, his new mistrusts beset him; with a wave of the hand he sent the dog among the undergrowth, and when it disappeared, there rose among the tangle of the wood

an

eerie call, indefinite, despondent, like a dirge. Had the land itself a voice and memory of a golden age of sunshine and eternal Spring, thus might it be lamenting. But still-but still 'twas not a voice of nature, rather to the ear of Wanlock like the utterance of a creature lost in some strange country looking for home and love. So call the fallen angels in the interspace, remembering joys evanished.

A hand fell on the listener's shoulder: he flinched and turned to look in the face of his daughter Mirren.

66 Have you heard the news?" VOL. CLXXXVI.-NO. MCXXX.

she asked him, breathing deeply, with a wan and troubled aspect.

He held up an arresting hand, and "Hush!" he said, "there is something curious in the wood. . . . Did ye not hear it? Something curious in the wood. . . . In the wood. . . Did ye not ..・・ . . . did ye not

hear it?" and his head sank down upon his shoulders; his eyes went questing through the columns of the trees.

Again the cry rose, farther in the distance, burdened with a sense of desolation.

"A bittern," said Mirren ; "it can only be a bittern."

"Do ye think I have not thought of that?" asked Wanlock. "Have ye ever heard a bittern boom at this time of the year, and in the middle of the day?"

"I have heard it once or twice at night of late," said his daughter. "It can only be a bittern, or some other creature may be wounded. Do you know that The Peel has been plundered? Last night the strongroom was broken into."

"And robbed of the Mellish jewels?" broke in Wanlock, with exultant intuition.

"Yes, and a great collection of antique gems entrusted to Mellish for the purpose of a monograph he was writing," said the daughter.

asked

"A monograph?" Wanlock, still with eyes bent on the wood from which the dog returned indifferent.

"It is a book on gems he has been busy writing.

Wanlock sneered. "A book!" said he. "I'm thinking he'd 3 F

one

be better at some other business. I find, myself, but the Book needful; all the others are but vanity, and lead but to confusion. And he was pillaged, was he? Well, there's this, it might have been a man who could afford it less, for Mellish was the wealthiest in the shire."

"But now he is the poorest," said the girl with pity. "I'm told it means his utter ruin."

"There's the money of the Glasfurd girl to patch his broken fortune with; they're long enough engaged if the clash of the countryside be true," said Wanlock, and his daughter blenched, while the wailing cry rose up again beyond the fir-tops on the moorland edge.

Wanlock stood confused a moment, then seized her by the arm. "Would ye have me vexed for him?" said he. "Now I-with your permission -look upon it as a dispensation. If Mellish is ruined, Dreghorn is the richest man in the countryside and the better match for you

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nights unhappy, and sent her fleeing like a wild thing to the hills, or roving with a rebel heart in all the solitary places of the valley. At any other hour this spirit would have made him furious; to-day he was elated at her news, and let her go.

His joy, however, was but transitory. Searching with a candle late that evening through his wine-cellar among dusty bins whose empty niches gloomily announced the ebbing tide of that red sea of pleasure, or its fictitious wave, that had swept so high on ancient jovial nights to the lips of many generations of the guests of Manor, a yellow glint as from a reptile's eye fastened upon him from a cobwebbed corner. He stared at it in horror and unbelief, closed in upon it with his guttering candle, warily, and found himself once more the owner of the brooch !

In the chill of the vault he felt, for a moment, the convulsion of a mind confronted with some vast mysterious power whose breath was loathsome, deathly, redolent of dust and fraught with retribution, and fearing an actual presence, almost shrieked when the flame of his candle was extinguished in the draught of a slowly opening door. He stood all trembling, with the jewel in his hand: a mocking chuckle rose in the outer night: all the old eerie tales of childhood then were true! He heard approaching cautious footsteps; a light was struck: a taper flared, and he faced the ne'erdo-well, his son!

"At the wine again,

father!" some efhis perdamned

Stephen?" he said with unspeakable sadness, for indeed the lad had been the apple of his eye, and he knew too well his failing. "Not this time, said the son, with frontery in spite of turbation. "There's little left between us: we're at the dregs of the old Bordeaux. I dropped-I dropped something last time I was here, I fancy, and I'm come to seek for it."

His father's cheek in the daytime would have ashened: in the taper light it merely shook and crinkled colourlessly like a scum. He held the brooch out in his hand, and asked, "Is that it, Stephen?" in the simple phrase of a man with his last illusion shattered, and the son confessed.

He had been shown to the strong-room when he carried the brooch to Mellish: the sight of its contents and all their possibilities of life and pleasure had fevered him with desire: he had returned in cover of night and plundered the

treasure of The Peel.

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protested Stephen sullenly. "I was observed, whether by man or woman, beast or bogle, I cannot tell, but I heard the laugh at my elbow, and I ran. It pattered at my heels, and would have caught me if I had not dropped my burden in the old Peel well."

"And there let it lie and rot!" exclaimed his father. "But you-oh, Stephen!-you to be the robber! and bring on me the second blow!" and the wine-vault rang with the blame and lamentation of a shattered

man.

The son was packed off on the morrow lest a worse thing should befall in a suspicion of his part in the fall of Mellish : his father paid the last penny of his available money for the journey to the south: the search for the spoiler passed into other parts of the country, and was speedily abandoned. When the hue and cry had ceased, old Wanlock, professing to have found the brooch on the roadside, sent it back to Mellish, and waited with a savage expectation for another demonstration of its power.

He had not long to wait. The very day on which the talisman was sent, the match of Mellish with the Glasfurd girl-as rich as she was proud, haughty, and ambitious-was broken off by one who could not bring herself to marry a beggared man, and the tale, by gossip amplified and rendered almost laughable, went round the parish like a song.

'Twas Dreghorn brought the

"A liar, too!" wailed Wan- news to Manor-the ancient look. wooer. Wanlock broke &

"It is nothing but the truth," bottle of wine and made the

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