places in the mountains. That is my idea; do you think it worth
anything?"

His face flushed all over in an instant. "I think it an inspiration!" he
cried. "Not a day is to be lost in carrying out our plan. The police are
not to be trusted with it. I must start myself to-morrow morning; and
you--"

He stopped; his face grew suddenly pale; he sighed heavily; his eyes
wandered once more into the fixed look at vacancy; and the rigid,
deathly expression fastened again upon all his features.

"I must tell you my secret before I talk of to-morrow," he proceeded,
faintly. "If I hesitated any longer at confessing everything, I should
be unworthy of your past kindness, unworthy of the help which it is my
last hope that you will gladly give me when you have heard all."

I begged him to wait until he was more composed, until he was better
able to speak; but he did not appear to notice what I said. Slowly, and
struggling as it seemed against himself, he turned a little away from
me, and, bending his head over the table, supported it on his hand. The
packet of letters with which I had seen him occupied when I came in lay
just beneath his eyes. He looked down on it steadfastly when he next
spoke to me.

CHAPTER IV.

"You were born, I believe, in our county," he said; "perhaps, therefore,
you may have heard at some time of a curious old prophecy about our
family, which is still preserved among the traditions of Wincot Abbey?"

"I have heard of such a prophecy," I answered, "but I never knew in what
terms it was expressed. It professed to predict the extinction of your
family, or something of that sort, did it not?"

"No inquiries," he went on, "have traced back that prophecy to the time
when it was first made; none of our family records tell us anything of
its origin. Old servants and old tenants of ours remember to have heard
it from their fathers and grandfathers. The monks, whom we succeeded in
the Abbey in Henry the Eighth's time, got knowledge of it in some way,
for I myself discovered the rhymes, in which we know the prophecy to
have been preserved from a very remote period, written on a blank leaf
of one of the Abbey manuscripts. These are the verses, if verses they
deserve to be called:

When in Wincot vault a place
Waits for one of Monkton's race--
When that one forlorn shall lie
Graveless under open sky,
Beggared of six feet of earth,
Though lord of acres from his birth--