there, in the midst of a bitter January night, and the next morning her dead body and that of her new-born infant were found half buried in the fresh-fallen snow on the top of the wolds.  The ‘white lady’ is still supposed by the villagers to haunt that side of the glen.  And so it went on.  A beautiful, heartless Mervyn in Queen Anne’s time enticed away the affections of her sister’s betrothed, and on the day of her own wedding with him, her forsaken sister was found drowned by her own act in the pond at the bottom of the garden.  Two brothers were soldiers together in some Continental war, and one was involuntarily the means of discovering and exposing the treason of the other.  A girl was betrayed into a false marriage, and her life ruined by a man who came into the house as her brother’s friend, and whose infamous designs were forwarded and finally accomplished by that same brother’s active though unsuspecting assistance.  Generation after generation, men or women, guilty or innocent, through the action of their own will or in spite of it, the curse has never yet failed of its victims.”

“Never yet?  But surely in our own time—­your father?” I did not dare to put the question which was burning my lips.

“Have you never heard of the tragic end of my poor young uncles?” he replied.  “They were several years older than my father.  When boys of fourteen and fifteen they were sent out with the keeper for their first shooting lesson, and the elder shot his brother through the heart.  He himself was delicate, and they say that he never entirely recovered from the shock.  He died before he was twenty, and my father, then a child of seven years old, became the heir.  It was partly, no doubt, owing to this calamity having thus occurred before he was old enough to feel it, that his comparative skepticism on the whole subject was due.  To that I suppose, and to the fact that he grew up in an age of railways and liberal culture.”

“He didn’t believe, then, in the curse?”

“Well, rather, he thought nothing about it.  Until, that is, the time came when it took effect, to break his heart and end his life.”

“How do you mean?”

There was silence for a little.  Alan had turned away his head, so that I could not see his face.  Then—­

“I suppose you have never been told the true story of why Jack left the country?”

“No.  Was he—­is he—?”

“He is one victim of the curse in this generation, and I, God help me, am the other, and perhaps more wretched one.”

His voice trembled and broke, and for the first time that day I almost forgot the mysterious horror of the night before, in my pity for the actual, tangible suffering before me.  I stretched out my hand to his, and his fingers closed on mine with a sudden, painful grip.  Then quietly—­

“I will tell you the story,” he said, “though since that miserable time I have spoken of it to no one.”