realities, Marston himself was striding alone through the wildest and darkest solitudes of his park, haunted by his own unholy thoughts, and, it may be, by those other evil and unearthly influences which wander, as we know, “in desert places.”  Darkness overtook him, and the chill of night, in these lonely tracts.  In his solitary walk, what fearful company had he been keeping!  As the shades of night deepened round him, the sense of the neighborhood of ill, the consciousness of the foul fancies or which, where he was now treading, he had been for hours the sport, oppressed him with a vague and unknown terror; a certain horror of the thoughts which had been his comrades through the day, which he could not now shake off, and which haunted him with a ghastly and defiant pertinacity, scared, while they half-enraged him.  He stalked swiftly homewards, like a guilty man pursued.

Marston was not perfectly satisfied, though very nearly, with the evidence now in his possession.  The letter, the stolen perusal of which had so agitated him that day, bore no signature; but, independently of the handwriting, which seemed, spite of the constraint of an attempted disguise, to be familiar to his eye, there existed, in the matter of the letter, short as it was, certain internal evidences, which, although not actually conclusive, raised, in conjunction with all the other circumstances, a powerful presumption in aid of his suspicions.  He resolved, however, to sift the matter further, and to bide his time.  Meanwhile his manner must indicate no trace of his dark surmises and bitter thoughts.  Deception, in its two great branches, simulation and dissimulation, was easy to him.  His habitual reserve and gloom would divest any accidental and momentary disclosure of his inward trouble of everything suspicious or unaccountable, which would have characterized such displays and eccentricities in another man.

His rapid and reckless ramble, a kind of physical vent for the paroxysm which had so agitated him throughout the greater part of the day, had soiled and disordered his dress, and thus had helped to give to his whole appearance a certain air of haggard wildness, which, in the privacy of his chamber, he hastened carefully and entirely to remove.

At supper, Marston was apparently in unusually good spirits.  Sir Wynston and he chatted gaily and fluently upon many subjects, grave and gay.  Among them the inexhaustible topic of popular superstition happened to turn up, and especially the subject of strange prophecies of the fates and fortunes of individuals, singularly fulfilled in the events of their afterlife.

“By-the-by, Dick, this is rather a nervous topic for me to discuss,” said Sir Wynston.

“How so?” asked his host.

“Why, don’t you remember?” urged the baronet.

“No, I don’t recollect what you allude to,” replied Marston, in all sincerity.

“Why, don’t you remember Eton?” pursued Sir Wynston.