Soon after this incident Cranstoun was summoned to Scotland, where his mother, Lady Cranstoun, was “extremely ill.”  “Good God!” cried this admirable son, “what shall I do?  I have no money to carry me thither, and all my fortune is seized on but my half-pay!” For the third time Miss Blandy came to the rescue, even giving him back a miniature of his ugly countenance with which he had formerly presented her.  At six o’clock next morning he set out for the North in a post-chaise.  The old attorney rose early with good heart to speed the parting guest, and furnished him with a half-pint bottle of rum for the journey.  Mary says they “all shed tears”; if so, hers were the only genuine tokens of regret.  As she waved good-bye to her lover and watched the departing chaise till it was lost to view along the London road, she little thought that, although his sinister influence would remain with her to the end, his graceless person had passed from her sight for ever.

It was the month of November, 1750, when Cranstoun took final leave of Henley.  In October, a year after Mrs. Blandy’s death, divers curious phenomena had been observed in the old house by the bridge.  Cranstoun professed that he could get no sleep o’ nights, in his room “over the great parlour,” by reason of unearthly music sounding through the chamber after midnight, for two hours at a time.  On his informing his host of the circumstance, Mr. Blandy caustically observed, “It was Scotch music, I suppose?” from which Miss Blandy inferred that he was not in a good humour—­though the inference seems somewhat strained.  This manifestation was varied by rappings, rustlings, banging of doors, footfalls on the stairs, and other eerie sounds, “which greatly terrified Mr. Cranstoun.”  The old man was plainly annoyed by these stories, though he merely expressed the opinion that his guest was “light-headed.”  But when Cranstoun one morning announced that he had been visited in the night, as the clock struck two, by the old gentleman’s wraith, “with his white stockings, his coat on, and a cap on his head,” Mr. Blandy “did not seem pleased with the discourse,” and the subject was dropped.  But Mary, mentioning these strange matters to the maids, expressed the fear that such happenings boded no good to her father, and told how Mr. Cranstoun had learned from a cunning woman in Scotland that they were the messengers of death, and that her father would die within the year.

Whatever weight might attach to these gloomy prognostications of the mysterious Mrs. Morgan, it became obvious that from about that date Francis Blandy’s health began to fail.  He was in the sixty-second year of his age, and he suffered the combined assault of gout, gravel, and heartburn.  The state of irritation and suspense consequent upon his daughter’s relations with her lover must greatly have aggravated his troubles.  It was assumed by the prosecution, on the ground of Mr. Blandy losing his teeth through decay, that he had begun to manifest the effects of