Suddenly, across the sward towards the palace there came the slight, impish, almost one-sided figure, with the peculiar walk, swift though suggestive of a limp, the elfish set of the plume, the foreign adjustment of short cloak.  Anne gazed with wide-stretched eyes and beating heart, trying to rally her senses and believe it fancy, when the figure crossed into a broad streak of light cast by the lamp over the door, the face was upturned for a moment.  It was deadly pale, and the features were beyond all doubt Peregrine Oakshott’s.

She sprang back from the window, dropped on her knees, with her face hidden in her hands, and was hardly conscious till sounds of the others returning made her rally her powers so as to prevent all inquiries or surmises.  It was Mrs. Labadie and Pauline Dunord, the former to see that all was well with the Prince before repairing to the Cockpit.

“How pale you are!” she exclaimed.  “Have you seen anything?”

“I—­It may be nothing.  He is dead!” stammered Anne.

“Oh then, ’tis naught but a maid’s fancies,” said the nurse good-humouredly.  “Miss Dunord is in no mind for the sports, so she will stay with His Highness, and you had best come with me and drive the cobwebs out of your brain.”

“Indeed, I thank you, ma’am, but I could not,” said Anne.

“You had best, I tell you, shake these megrims out of your brain,” said Mrs. Labadie; but she was in too great haste not to lose her share of the amusements to argue the point, and the two young women were left together.  Pauline was in a somewhat exalted state, full of the sermon on the connection of the Church with the invisible world.

“You have seen one of your poor dead,” she said.  “Oh, may it not be that he came to implore you to have pity, and join the Church, where you could intercede and offer the Holy Sacrifice for him?”

Anne started.  This seemed to chime in with proclivities of poor Peregrine’s own, and when she thought of his corpse in that unhallowed vault, it seemed to her as if he must be calling on her to take measures for his rest, both of body and of spirit.  Yet something seemed to seal her tongue.  She could not open her lips on what she had seen, and while Pauline talked on, repeating the sermon which had so deeply touched her feelings, Anne heard without listening to aught besides her own perturbations, mentally debating whether she could endure to reveal the story to Father Crump, if she confessed to him, or whether she should write to her uncle; and she even began to compose the letter in her own mind, with the terrible revelation that must commence it, but every moment the idea became more formidable.  How transfer her own heavy burthen to her uncle, who might feel bound to take steps that would cut young Archfield off from parents, sister, child, and home.  Or supposing Dr. Woodford disbelieved the apparition of to-night, the whole would be discredited in his eyes, and he might suppose the summer morning’s duel as much a delusion of her fancy as the autumn evening’s phantom, and what evidence had she to adduce save Charles’s despair, Peregrine’s absence, and what there might be in the vault?