“Not I. Indeed, the church is not in sight from here.  No, Grace, I never saw any thing supernatural:  and I am sorry for it, for I laugh at people’s notion that a dead man has any power to injure the living; how can a cold wind come from a disembodied spirit?  I am all that a ghost is, and something more; and I only wish I could call the dead from their graves; I’d soon have a dozen gentlemen and ladies out of that old church-yard into this very room.  And, if they would only come, you would see me converse with them as civilly and as calmly as I am doing with you.  The fact is, I have some questions to put, which only the dead can answer—­passages in the family correspondence, referring to things I can’t make out for the life of me.”

“Oh, Mr. Raby, pray don’t talk in this dreadful way, for fear they should be angry and come.”  And Grace looked fearfully round over her shoulder.

Mr. Raby shook his head; and there was a dead silence.

Mr. Raby broke it rather unexpectedly.  “But,” said he, gravely, “if I have seen nothing, I’ve heard something.  Whether it was supernatural, I can’t say; but, at least, it was unaccountable and terrible.  I have heard the Gabriel hounds.”

Mr. Coventry and Grace looked at one another, and then inquired, almost in a breath, what the Gabriel hounds were.

“A strange thing in the air that is said, in these parts, to foretell calamity.”

“Oh dear!” said Grace, “this is thrilling again; pray tell us.”

“Well, one night I was at Hillsborough on business, and, as I walked by the old parish church, a great pack of beagles, in full cry, passed close over my head.”

“Oh!”

“Yes; they startled me, as I never was startled in my life before.  I had never heard of the Gabriel hounds then, and I was stupefied.  I think I leaned against the wall there full five minutes, before I recovered myself, and went on.”

“Oh dear!  But did any thing come of it?”

“You shall judge for yourself.  I had left a certain house about an hour and a half:  there was trouble in that house, but only of a pecuniary kind.  To tell the truth, I came back with some money for them, or rather, I should say, with the promise of it.  I found the wife in a swoon:  and, upstairs, her husband lay dead by his own hand.”

“Oh, my poor godpapa!” cried Grace, flinging her arm tenderly round his neck.

“Ay, my child, and the trouble did not end there.  Insult followed; ingratitude; and a family feud, which is not healed yet, and never will be—­till she and her brat come on their knees to me.”

Mr. Raby had no sooner uttered these last words with great heat, than he was angry with himself.  “Ah!” said he, “the older a man gets, the weaker.  To think of my mentioning that to you young people!” And he rose and walked about the room in considerable agitation and vexation.  “Curse the Gabriel hounds!  It is the first time I have spoken of them since that awful night; it is the last I ever will speak of them.  What they are, God, who made them, knows.  Only I pray I may never hear them again, nor any friend of mine.”