she foretold the curse which should rest upon their descendants for generations to come.  A clergyman who was present, horrified, it is said at her words, adjured her by the mercy of Heaven to place some term to the doom which she had pronounced.  She replied that no mortal might reckon the fruit of a plant which drew its life from hell; that a term there should be, but as it passed the wisdom of man to fix it, so it should pass the wit of man to discover it.  She then placed in the room this cabinet, constructed by herself and her Italian follower, and said that the curse should not depart from the family until the day when its doors were unlocked and its legend read.

“Such is the story.  I tell it to you as it was told to me.  One thing only is certain, that the doom thus traditionally foretold has been only too amply fulfilled.”

“And what was the doom?”

Alan hesitated a little, and when he spoke his voice was almost awful in its passionless sternness, in its despairing finality; it seemed to echo the irrevocable judgment which his words pronounced:  “That the crimes against God and each other which had destroyed the parents’ life should enter into the children’s blood, and that never thereafter should there fail a Mervyn to bring shame or death upon one generation of his father’s house.

“There were two sons of that ill-fated marriage,” he went on after a pause, “boys at the time of their parents’ death.  When they grew up they both fell in love with the same woman, and one killed the other in a duel.  The story of the next generation was a peculiarly sad one.  Two brothers took opposite sides during the civil troubles; but so fearful were they of the curse which lay upon the family, that they chiefly made use of their mutual position in order to protect and guard each other.  After the wars were over, the younger brother, while traveling upon some parliamentary commission, stopped a night at the Grange.  There, through a mistake, he exchanged the report which he was bringing to London for a packet of papers implicating his brother and several besides in a royalist plot.  He only discovered his error as he handed the papers to his superior, and was but just able to warn his brother in time for him to save his life by flight.  The other men involved were taken and executed, and as it was known by what means information had reached the Government, the elder Mervyn was universally charged with the vilest treachery.  It is said that when after the Restoration his return home was rumored the neighboring gentry assembled, armed with riding whips, to flog him out of the country if he should dare to show his face there.  He died abroad, shame-stricken and broken-hearted.  It was his son, brought up by his uncle in the sternest tenets of Puritanism, who, coming home after a lengthened journey, found that during his absence his sister had been shamefully seduced.  He turned her out of doors, then and