“By all means.  Take my arm, Lady Emily.  Euphra, will you take the keys again, and lock the doors?”

Mrs. Elton had already taken Hugh’s arm, and was leading him away after Mr. Arnold and Lady Emily.

“I will not leave you behind with the spectres, Miss Cameron,” said Funkelstein.

“Thank you; they will not detain me long.  They don’t mind being locked up.”

It was some little time, however, before they presented themselves in the drawing-room, to which, and not to the library, the party had gone:  they had had enough of horrors for that night.

Lest my readers should think they have had too many wonders at least, I will explain one of them.  It was really Margaret Elginbrod whom Hugh had seen.  Mrs. Elton was the lady in whose service she had left her home.  It was nothing strange that they had not met, for Margaret knew he was in the same house, and had several times seen him, but had avoided meeting him.  Neither was it a wonderful coincidence that they should be in such close proximity; for the college friend from whom Hugh had first heard of Mr. Arnold, was the son of the gentleman whom Mrs. Elton was visiting, when she first saw Margaret.

Margaret had obeyed her mistress’s summons to the drawing-room, and had entered while Hugh was stooping over the plate.  As the room was nearly dark, and she was dressed in black, her pale face alone caught the light and his eye as he looked up, and the giddiness which followed had prevented him from seeing more.  She left the room the next moment, while they were all looking out of the window.  Nor was it any exercise of his excited imagination that had presented her face as glorified.  She was now a woman; and, there being no divine law against saying so, I say that she had grown a lady as well; as indeed any one might have foreseen who was capable of foreseeing it.  Her whole nature had blossomed into a still, stately, lily-like beauty; and the face that Hugh saw was indeed the realised idea of the former face of Margaret.

But how did the plate move? and whence came the writing of old David’s name?  I must, for the present, leave the whole matter to the speculative power of each of my readers.

But Margaret was in mourning:  was David indeed dead?

He was dead. —­ Yet his name will stand as the name of my story for pages to come; because, if he had not been in it, the story would never have been worth writing; because the influence of that ploughman is the salt of the whole; because a man’s life in the earth is not to be measured by the time he is visible upon it; and because, when the story is wound up, it will be in the presence of his spirit.

Do I then believe that David himself did write that name of his?

Heaven forbid that any friend of mine should be able to believe it!

Long before she saw him, Margaret had known, from what she heard among the servants, that Master Harry’s tutor could be no other than her own tutor of the old time.  By and by she learned a great deal about him from Harry’s talk with Mrs. Elton and Lady Emily.  But she did not give the least hint that she knew him, or betray the least desire to see him.