crouching figure looking at its work with
starting eyes and pallid back-drawn lips; and seeing, recognize no face
that I had ever known, but one so handsome, so remarkable, so unique in
its formation and character, that it would be as easy for me to mistake
the countenance of my father as the look and figure of the man revealed
to me in my dream."

"And this face?" said I, in a voice I failed to recognize as my own.

"Was that of him whom we saw leave Mary Leavenworth's presence last
night and go down the hall to the front door."

XXI. A PREJUDICE

"True, I talk of dreams,
'Which are the children of an idle brain
Begot of nothing but vain phantasy."
--Romeo and Juliet.

FOR one moment I sat a prey to superstitious horror; then, my natural
incredulity asserting itself, I looked up and remarked:

"You say that all this took place the night previous to the actual
occurrence?"

He bowed his head. "For a warning," he declared.

"But you did not seem to take it as such?"

"No; I am subject to horrible dreams. I thought but little of it in a
superstitious way till I looked next day upon Mr. Leavenworth's dead
body."

"I do not wonder you behaved strangely at the inquest."

"Ah, sir," he returned, with a slow, sad smile; "no one knows what
I suffered in my endeavors not to tell more than I actually knew,
irrespective of my dream, of this murder and the manner of its
accomplishment."

"You believe, then, that your dream foreshadowed the manner of the
murder as well as the fact?"

"I do."

"It is a pity it did not go a little further, then, and tell us how
the assassin escaped from, if not how he entered, a house so securely
fastened."

His face flushed. "That would have been convenient," he repeated.
"Also, if I had been informed where Hannah was, and why a stranger and a
gentleman should have stooped to the committal of such a crime."

Seeing that he was nettled, I dropped my bantering vein. "Why do you
say a stranger?" I asked; "are you so well acquainted with all who visit
that house as to be able to say who are and who are not strangers to the
family?

"I am well acquainted with the faces of their friends, and Henry
Clavering is not amongst the number; but----"

"Were you ever with Mr. Leavenworth," I interrupted, "when he has been
away from home; in the country, for instance, or upon his travels?"

"No." But the negative came with some constraint.

"Yet I suppose he w