How did it happen?  How could it have happened?  Ay, how indeed?  It was a question which has never been entirely solved in Church Leet to this day.

Captain Monk’s account, both privately and at the inquest, was this:  As they talked further together, after Michael left the room, the Vicar went on to browbeat him shamefully about the new chimes, vowing they should never play, never be heard; at last, rising in an access of passion, the Parson struck him (the Captain) in the face.  He returned the blow—­who wouldn’t return it?—­and the Vicar fell.  He believed his head must have struck against the iron fender in falling:  if not, if the blow had been an unlucky one (it took effect just behind the left ear), it was only given in self-defence.  The jury, composed of Captain Monk’s tenants, expressed themselves satisfied, and returned a verdict of Accidental Death.

“A false account,” pronounced poor Mrs. West, in her dire tribulation.  “My husband never struck him—­never; he was not one to be goaded into unbecoming anger, even by Captain Monk. George struck no blow whatever; I can answer for it.  If ever a man was murdered, he has been.”

Curious rumours arose.  It was said that Mrs. Carradyne, taking the air on the terrace outside in the calmness of the autumn evening, heard the fatal quarrel through the open window; that she heard Mr. West, after he had received the death blow, wail forth a prophecy (or whatever it might be called) that those chimes would surely be accursed; that whenever their sound should be heard, so long as they were suffered to remain in the tower, it should be the signal of woe to the Monk family.

Mrs. Carradyne utterly denied this; she had not been on the terrace at all, she said.  Upon which the onus was shifted to Michael:  who, it was suspected, had stolen out to listen to the end of the quarrel, and had heard the ominous words.  Michael, in his turn, also denied it; but he was not believed.  Anyway, the covert whisper had gone abroad and would not be laid.

III.

Captain Monk speedily filled up the vacant living, appointing to it the Reverend Thomas Dancox, an occasional visitor at Leet Hall, who was looking out for one.

The new Vicar turned out to be a man after the Captain’s heart, a rollicking, jovial, fox-hunting young parson, as many a parson was in those days—­and took small blame to himself for it.  He was only a year or two past thirty, good-looking, of taking manners and hail-fellow-well-met with the parish in general, who liked him and called him to his face Tom Dancox.

All this pleased Captain Monk.  But very soon something was to arrive that did not please him—­a suspicion that the young parson and his daughter Katherine were on rather too good terms with one another.

One day in November he stalked into the drawing-room, where Katherine was sitting with her aunt.  Hubert and Eliza were away at school, also Mrs. Carradyne’s two children.