nt
incapable of grasping the fact before him.

"Almost the last thing the man said was to ask me why ghosts haunted the
night rather than the day."

Lennox and Mannering to bring him news when the telegram dispatched to
Scotland Yard was answered, and prepared to leave them.

As he rose, he marked his old spaniel standing whimpering by his side.

"What is the matter with Prince?" he asked.

"He has not had his dinner," said Mary.

"Let him be fed at once," answered her father, and went out alone.

She rose to follow him immediately, but Mannering, who had stopped and
was with them, begged her not to do so.

"Leave him to himself," he said. "This has shaken your father, as well
it may. He's all right. Make him take his bromide to-night, and let
nobody do anything to worry him."

The master of Chadlands meantime went afield, walked half a mile to a
favorite spot, and sat down upon a seat that he had there erected. A
storm was blowing up from the south-west, and the weather of his mind
welcomed it. He alternated between bewilderment and indignation. His
own life-long philosophy and trust in the ordered foundations of human
existence threatened to fail him entirely before this second stroke. It
seemed that the punctual universe was suddenly turned upside down, and
had emptied a vial of horror upon his innocent head.

Reality was a thing of the past. A nightmare had taken its place, a
nightmare from which there was no waking. He considered the stability
of his days--a lifetime followed upon high principles and founded on
religious convictions that had comforted his sorrows and countenanced
his joys. It seemed a trial undeserved, that in his old age he should be
thrust upon a pinnacle of publicity, forced into the public eye,
robbed of dignity, denied the privacy he esteemed as the most precious
privilege that wealth could command. Stability was destroyed; to
count upon the morrow seemed impossible. His thought, strung to a new
morbidity, unknown till now, ran on and pictured, with painful, vivid
stroke upon stroke, the insufferable series of events that lay before
him.

Life was become a bizarre and brutal business for a man of fine feeling.
He would be thrust into the pitiless mouth of sensation-mongers,
called to appear before tribunals, subjected to an inquisition of
his fellow-men, made to endure a notoriety infinitely odious even
in anticipation. Indeed, Sir Walter's simple intellect wallowed in
anticipati