o my hands a note she had written while thus speaking.
"Receive your credentials. If there be any cause for alarm, or if I can
be of use, send for me." Resuming the work she had suspended, but with
lingering, uncertain fingers, she added, "So far, then, this is settled.
Nay, no thanks; it is but little that is settled as yet."

CHAPTER IX.

In a very few minutes I was once more in the grounds of that old gable
house; the servant, who went before me, entered them by the stairs and
the wicket-gate of the private entrance; that way was the shortest.
So again I passed by the circling glade and the monastic well,--sward,
trees, and ruins all suffused in the limpid moonlight.

And now I was in the house; the servant took up-stairs the note with
which I was charged, and a minute or two afterwards returned and
conducted me to the corridor above, in which Mrs. Ashleigh received me.
I was the first to speak.

"Your daughter--is--is--not seriously ill, I hope. What is it?"

"Hush!" she said, under her breath. "Will you step this way for a
moment?" She passed through a doorway to the right. I followed her,
and as she placed on the table the light she had been holding, I looked
round with a chill at the heart,--it was the room in which Dr. Lloyd had
died. Impossible to mistake. The furniture indeed was changed, there was
no bed in the chamber; but the shape of the room, the position of the
high casement, which was now wide open, and through which the moonlight
streamed more softly than on that drear winter night, the great square
beams intersecting the low ceiling,--all were impressed vividly on my
memory. The chair to which Mrs. Ashleigh beckoned me was placed just on
the spot where I had stood by the bedhead of the dying man.

I shrank back,--I could not have seated myself there. So I remained
leaning against the chimney-piece, while Mrs. Ashleigh told her story.

She said that on their arrival the day before, Lilian had been in more
than usually good health and spirits, delighted with the old house,
the grounds, and especially the nook by the Monk's Well, at which Mrs.
Ashleigh had left her that evening in order to make some purchases in
the town, in company with Mr. Vigors. When Mrs. Ashleigh returned, she
and Mr. Vigors had sought Lilian in that nook, and Mrs. Ashleigh then
detected, with a mother's eye, some change in Lilian which alarmed her.
She seemed listless and dejected, and was very pale; but she denied that