It could not but occur to Edwin, Had the abbot come back to his old haunt on some errand?  Had he a benevolent ghostly interest in its present inhabitants?  Here was a work in which even a spirit of mark might engage without loss of dignity and with perfect propriety.  He might turn tables on the perverse circumstances that kept two young people separate; and if marriages are made in heaven, an angel need not despise such a mission as making two lovers happy.

“Well” thought Edwin, “if you are Abbot John, how do you like to see the dear old stones of your monastery built into dykes? or would you have preferred seeing them applied to villa purposes?” If it were the abbot, Edwin felt he would like to have that familiar kind of intercourse with him which in our country is known as twa-handed crack; and if it were not the abbot, he had a wonderful curiosity to know what it was—­to have it accounted for.  There it stood, apparently as firm and sure as the first moment he had seen it; and a cause it must have.

Accordingly, he dressed himself with the intention of proceeding to the spot to interview the abbot and see what kind of stuff he was made of.  Mr. Forrester took the lamp in his hand and opened the room-door softly:  not that he thought any one would hear him, but soft sounds best become the stillness of the night.  As he went down the stairs he became conscious of a cold air playing about, as if from an open door or window.  He set his lamp on the stone sill of the passage-window, and had his hand on the key of the outer door to unlock it, when he heard a quick, sudden scream, apparently from the oldest part of the building.  He listened intently for a second, but there was no repetition of it, and everything was perfectly quiet.

“That was human,” he said to himself; and seizing his lamp he ran along till he came to the door of the ancient keep, which was standing open:  he took the way he and the rest of the party had gone the previous afternoon, and found the doors that were usually kept locked all open.  Going on very hurriedly, he came to the room where the bare rafters were the only flooring, and at the other end of it he saw something like a white heap gleaming.  He strode across instantly, and stooping with the light in hand discovered Bessie Ormiston lying in a dead faint just at the edge of one of the rafters:  the least movement would have sent her down on the hard pavement below.  He did not stop to think how she came to be there:  setting his lamp where it would light him across the dangerous flooring, he lifted her up and threaded the passages and stairs in the darkness till he laid her safe on the dining-room sofa, still unconscious.