at last he sighted the heavy masses of old elm, and the pale, peeping front of the ’Tyled House,’ through the close and dismal avenue of elm, he reached the front of the mansion.  There was no glimmer of light from the lower windows, not even the noiseless flitting of a bat over the dark little court-yard.  His key let him in.  He knew that his servants were in bed.  There was something cynical in his ree-raw independence.  It was unlike what he had been used to, and its savagery suited with his bitter and unsociable mood of late.

But his step sounding through the hall, and the stories about the place of which he was conscious.  He battled with his disturbed foolish sensations, however, and though he knew there was a candle burning in his bed-room, he turned aside at the foot of the great stair, and stumbled and groped his way into the old wainscoted back-parlour, that looked out, through its great bow window, upon the haunted orchard, and sat down in its dismal solitude.

He ruminated upon his own hard fate—­the meanness of man-kind—­the burning wrongs, as he felt confident, of other times, Fortune’s inexorable persecution of his family, and the stygian gulf that deepened between him and the object of his love; and his soul darkened with a fierce despair, and with unshaped but evil thoughts that invited the tempter.

The darkness and associations of the place were unwholesome, and he was about to leave it for the companionship of his candle, but that, on a sudden, he thought he heard a sound nearer than the breeze among the old orchard trees.

This was the measured breathing of some one in the room.  He held his own breath while he listened—­’One of the dogs,’ he thought, and he called them quietly; but no dog came.  ‘The wind, then, in the chimney;’ and he got up resolutely, designing to open the half-closed shutter.  He fancied as he did so that he heard the respiration near him, and passed close to some one in the dark.

With an unpleasant expectation he threw back the shutters, and unquestionably he did see, very unmistakably, a dark figure in a chair; so dark, indeed, that he could not discern more of it than the rude but undoubted outline of a human shape; and he stood for some seconds, holding the open shutter in his hand, and looking at it with more of the reality of fear than he had, perhaps, ever experienced before.  Pale Hecate now, in the conspiracy, as it seemed, withdrew on a sudden the pall from before her face, and threw her beams full upon the figure.  A slim, tall shape, in dark clothing, and, as it seemed, a countenance he had never beheld before—­black hair, pale features, with a sinister-smiling character, and a very blue chin, and closed eyes.

Fixed with a strange horror, and almost expecting to see it undergo some frightful metamorphosis, Mervyn stood gazing on the cadaverous intruder.

‘Hollo! who’s that?’ cried Mervyn sternly.

The figure opened his eyes, with a wild stare, as if he had not opened them for a hundred years before, and rose up with an uncertain motion, returning Mervyn’s gaze, as if he did not know where he was.