?"

"I hope so."

"I hope so, too; but, at any rate, keep her up in her room till the
afternoon. The inquest will be at eleven o'clock, and it is better that
she should not come down until everyone has gone away."

CHAPTER IX.

Directly after breakfast was over the next morning the Rector came in.

"I would not come in yesterday, Mark," he said. "I knew that you would
be best alone; and, indeed, I was myself so terribly upset by the news
that I did not feel equal to it. I need not say how deeply I and my wife
sympathize with you. Never did a kinder heart beat than your father's;
never have I seen people so universally grieved as they are in the
village. I doubt whether a man went to work yesterday, and as for
the women, had it been a father they had lost they could not be more
affected."

"Yes, he will be greatly missed," Mark said unsteadily; "and, between
ourselves--but this must go no further--I have a suspicion, amounting
almost to a certainty, that the hand that dealt this blow is the same
that caused the vacancy that brought you here."

"Do you mean Arthur Bastow?" Mr. Greg said in amazement. "Why, I thought
that he was transported for fifteen years."

Then Mark told the Rector the inner history of the past six months,
and of the report they had had from the officer at Bow Street of the
personal appearance of the wounded man.

"Other things are in favor of it," he went on. "My father's watch and
purse were untouched, and a stranger on a dark night would be hardly
likely to have discovered the ladder, or to have had a file in his
pocket with which to cut through a link, though this might have been
part of the apparatus of any burglar. Then, again, an ordinary man would
hardly have known which was my father's bedroom, except, indeed, that he
saw the light there after those in the ladies' rooms were extinguished;
but, at any rate, he could not have told which was my father's and which
was mine. But all this is, as I said, Mr. Greg, quite between ourselves.
I had a long talk yesterday with Sir Charles Harris, and, as he said,
there is no legal proof whatever, strong as the suspicion is; so I am
going to say nothing on the subject at the inquest. The scoundrel's poor
father is dying, happily in ignorance of all this. Dr. Holloway was up
with him all night, and told me this morning before he drove off that it
is very unlikely that he will get through the day."

"It is all very terrible, Mark; but I c