“Back, all of you!  You must not stay here.  This is no place or sight for you.  Anne,” he added, seizing Miss Ashton’s hand in peremptory entreaty, “you at least know how to be calm.  Get them away, and keep them out of the hall.”

“Tell me the worst,” she implored.  “I will indeed try to be calm.  Who is it those men are bringing here?”

“My dear brother—­my dead brother.  Madam,” he continued to the countess-dowager, who had now come out, dinner-napkin in hand, her curls all awry, “you must not come here.  Go back to the dining-room, all of you.”

“Not come here!  Go back to the dining-room!” echoed the outraged dowager.  “Don’t take quite so much upon yourself, Val Elster.  The house is Lord Hartledon’s, and I am a free agent in it.”

A shriek—­an agonized shriek—­broke from Lady Maude.  In her suspense she had stolen out unperceived, and lifted the covering of the rude bier, now resting on the steps.  The rays of the hall-lamp fell on the face, and Maude, in her anguish, with a succession of hysterical sobs, came shivering back to sink down at her mother’s feet.

“Oh, my love—­my love!  Dead! dead!”

The only one who heard the words was Anne Ashton.  The countess-dowager caught the last.

“Who is dead?  What is this mystery?” she asked, unceremoniously lifting her satin dress, with the intention of going out to see, and her head began to nod—­perhaps with apprehension—­as if she had the palsy.  “You want to force us away.  No, thank you; not until I’ve come to the bottom of this.”

“Let us tell them,” cried young Carteret, in his boyish impulse, “and then perhaps they will go.  An accident has happened to Lord Hartledon, ma’am, and these men have brought him home.”

“He—­he’s not dead?” asked the old woman, in changed tones.

Alas! poor Lord Hartledon was indeed dead.  The Irish labourers, in passing near the mill, had detected the body in the water; rescued it, and brought it home.

The countess-dowager’s grief commenced rather turbulently.  She talked and shrieked, and danced round, exactly as if she had been a wild Indian.  It was so intensely ludicrous, that the occupants of the hall gazed in silence.

“Here to-day, and gone to-morrow!” she sobbed.  “Oh—­o—­o—­o—­o—­o—­oh!”

“Nay,” cried young Carteret, “here to-day, and gone now.  Poor fellow! it is awful.”

“And you have done it!” she cried, turning her grief upon the astonished boy.  “You!  What business had you to allure him off again in that miserable boat, once he had got home?”

“Don’t trample me down, please,” he indignantly returned; “I am as cut up as you can be.  Hedges, hadn’t you better get Lady Kirton’s maid here?  I think she is going mad.”

“And now the house is without a master,” she bemoaned, returning to her own griefs and troubles, “and I have all the arrangements thrown upon myself.”